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ny0189000 | [
"world"
] | 2009/05/03 | No Signs of Sustained Global Spread of Swine Flu | The World Health Organization announced an increase in the number of confirmed cases of swine flu on Saturday, but said there was no evidence of sustained spread in communities outside North America, which would fit the definition of a pandemic. Health officials say the continuing outbreak must be closely monitored. “At the present time, I would still propose that a pandemic is imminent because we are seeing transmission to other countries,” Dr. Michael J. Ryan, the director of the World Health Organization global alert and response team, said in a teleconference from Geneva. “We have to expect that Phase 6 will be reached. We have to hope that it is not.” Phase 6, the highest level in the organization’s alert system, is a pandemic. But Dr. Ryan emphasized that the term describes the geographic spread of a disease, not its severity. There can be a pandemic of a mild disease. The current level, Phase 5, means that the disease is spreading in communities — not just within households or in returning travelers — in two countries in one of the World Health Organization’s six regions, in this case the United States and Mexico. Phase 5 also means a pandemic is imminent. To move up to Phase 6, community spread would have to occur in at least one other country in another region. On Saturday, Canadian health officials said that the virus had been found in sick pigs on one farm in Alberta, the first report of the swine flu’s actually being found in swine. Previously, there had been heated debate about whether the virus could infect pigs, even though its genetic makeup clearly points to its having originated in swine at some point. But people were infecting each other, and until Saturday, no pigs had been found with the virus — a fact that the pork industry used to bolster its argument that the virus should not even be named for swine. But researchers, busy with human cases, were not really looking for the disease in pigs. The news from Canada changes things. But it has a somewhat unexpected twist: a person appears to have spread the disease to the pigs, and not the other way around. A worker at the farm had traveled to Mexico, fallen ill there and unknowingly brought the disease back to Canada last month. The worker has recovered. About 10 percent of the 2,200 pigs on the farm got sick. According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, all recovered without treatment in five days. The entire herd remains under quarantine as a precaution. “One of the reasons for watching this very closely is the potential for the virus passing back from the pigs to human beings,” David Butler-Jones, the chief public health officer of Canada, said at a news conference in Ottawa. He emphasized that the infection of the pigs by the human virus does not pose any increased threat to human health or the food supply. “The eating of pork is absolutely not a problem,” Dr. Butler-Jones said. Despite assurances from the Public Health Agency of Canada and Canadian agriculture officials, some countries banned imports of pork and pork products from Canada even before Saturday’s announcement. Brian Evans, the executive vice president of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, said that the Canadian government had informed the United States about the finding in Alberta. American officials, he added, indicated that they did not plan to ban Canadian products. On Saturday the W.H.O reported that there were 658 confirmed cases of the illness, officially known as Influenza A (H1N1) , in 16 countries. Dr. Ryan said that the health organization was sending 2.4 million doses of antiviral drugs to 72 countries, including many poor countries that do not have supplies of their own. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Saturday that there were 160 cases confirmed by laboratory tests in 21 states. (The agency posts the case count once a day; states sometimes report new cases later the same day, but they are not added to the official total until the next day.) Thirteen people have been hospitalized. “It’s important to remember that with seasonal flu , we get 200,000 hospitalizations each year, mostly the very old or very young or those with other problems that put them at high risk,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, head of respiratory disease at the disease centers, said at a news conference. Some businesses are already trying to cash in on the outbreak, and the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission have begun advising consumers to watch out for Internet scams selling useless drugs and ineffective masks to treat or prevent swine flu. In Mexico, health authorities expressed cautious optimism about what they called a “stabilizing” situation. For the second day in a row, Mexico City, with most of the confirmed cases, did not record any deaths attributable to the virus. As of Saturday morning, Mexico had confirmed 473 cases of H1N1, out of the 1,303 suspected cases that had been tested, indicating that the outbreak may be much smaller than it initially seemed. The death toll was raised Saturday night to 19. Mexico had 159 deaths thought to be caused by swine flu. But many had other causes: 66 have now been attributed to other illnesses. Other cases have yet to be tested. Dr. Schuchat of the C.D.C. took a cautious view of the optimistic reports from Mexico. “I’m encouraged by what I’ve heard out of Mexico, but it’s important that we remain vigilant,” she said. “We’ve seen times when things appeared to be getting better and then got worse. For example, in Canada’s outbreak of SARS, things were said to be getting better, then there was a second wave in nursing homes . I suspect that in Mexico we’ll be holding our breath for some time.” One source of concern and puzzlement in Mexico is the breakdown of deaths by gender. Of the 16 whose causes of death had been confirmed on Friday, 12 were women, including one who was pregnant. Mexico’s health secretary, José Ángel Córdova, confirmed that the flu seems to have struck harder at women than men in Mexico, but he could not explain why. Like many of the new or emerging infections that have taken the world by surprise — SARS and avian flu are examples — this one seems to have arisen at what scientists call the “animal-human interface.” “I think this is a phenomenon we’ve been observing over the last few decades,” Dr. Ryan said. He noted that some major threats to human health were of animal origin, including viruses that can wreak havoc when they jump from one species to another. “We have seen in the past that disease can spread from pigs to humans,” Dr. Ryan said. “It usually dead ends with one or two cases.” But in this case, he said, the disease is now spreading from person to person, with no evidence that pigs were transmitting it to people. Still, he said, “the animal-human interface needs to be watched carefully.” Infectious disease experts say it will be important to watch what this virus does over the coming weeks and months, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere, which will soon confront its winter flu season. If H1N1 takes hold there, that will be a red flag to scientists. “What could indeed happen is that this virus could dampen here during the summer per usual, and go to the Southern Hemisphere and pick up steam there and come back to bite us in our winter season next January and February, and it might come back in a more virulent form,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a public health and infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University. “It’s an influenza virus, and you just can’t predict what those critters are going to do.” Particularly worrisome is that a seasonal flu strain, common in the Southern Hemisphere and elsewhere, is resistant to Tamiflu , and could in theory pass that resistance to the new virus. Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine, also said the new virus could head south, and should be tracked closely. “It will presumably give some insight into how this virus is evolving both in transmissibility and in virulence,” Dr. Fineberg said. Meanwhile, as officials in the United States and elsewhere make plans for vaccine production, Dr. Schaffner said, “All that activity is very prudent.” | Swine Influenza;Epidemics;Medicine and Health;World Health Organization |
ny0188057 | [
"business",
"businessspecial2"
] | 2009/04/30 | Miniaturizing Solar Technology With Flexible Photovoltaic Cells | PHOTOVOLTAIC cells are already a familiar sight on rooftops. But one day, miniature cells may also be found in more unconventional places: power-generating windows, car sunroofs or even awnings. The new technology is the work of a researcher and his colleagues who developed a way to print ultrathin, semitransparent and flexible cells on plastic, cloth and other materials. If the technology succeeds, it may provide the solar industry with alternatives to the fixed installations that are common today: cells may be printed on plastic rolls that could be unfurled for dozens of uses, or stamped onto fabric for T-shirts or other clothes that collect energy while worn. The researcher, John A. Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and his team use a standard printing technique to create solar cells that are a tenth the thickness of conventional semiconductor cells, or even thinner. The cells are so flexible that dense arrays of them can be rolled tightly around a pencil. The technology has been licensed to Semprius, a semiconductor company in Durham, N.C., that expects to begin a pilot project making solar modules in about a year. Dr. Rogers’s approach offers a unique strategy for making highly efficient, flexible solar cells for large-scale production, said Ali Javey, an electrical engineer and assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-wrote a review of the work for the journal Nature Materials Traditional silicon solar cells are rigid, heavy and opaque, but they dominate the technology because they are very reliable and efficient, he said, and because silicon is abundant. Still, the brittleness of silicon limits its uses. Dr. Rogers “has figured out how to grab thin layers of silicon or other inorganics, and put them on whatever substrates you want,” Dr. Javey said. Dr. Rogers’s work is an extension of techniques that he and his collaborators have developed for making flexible electronics over the past five years. The thin solar cells are first fabricated on semiconductor wafers using standard lithographic techniques and then transferred by a soft rubber stamp onto another material, Dr. Rogers said. The sticky surface of the stamp “picks up the cells,” he said, “and now your stamp is inked with these silicon cells. Then we use the stamp to print them on, for instance, a sheet of plastic.” George M. Whitesides, a renowned chemist and professor in the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, said that Dr. Rogers’s research took advantage of years of progress in silicon fabrication, while at the same time overcoming a basic restriction. “Silicon does work well, but it’s always been the limitation that you make silicon devices on hard, rigid, planal surfaces,” Dr. Whitesides said. Dr. Rogers has retained the technology for creating silicon devices but developed new forms that were previously off-limits because of silicon’s lack of flexibility. “He’s extended an important technology in directions that will certainly open new applications,” Dr. Whitesides said. And the ability to make the cells semitransparent may lead to novel uses, for example, in tinted window coatings that also produce energy, Dr. Javey said. The transparency in the cells can be adjusted by controlling their density by printing sheets with fewer cells to enable more light to come though. “Then you can see through the cells as you could through tinted film,” he said. At its plant in Durham, N.C., where Semprius is developing technology for solar cell arrays, Joe Carr, the company’s chief executive, said, “We almost can’t keep up with all of the opportunities that have been presented to us.” Semprius is working on photovoltaic modules for potential customers including automotive companies interested in the new cells for car roofs, he said. Dr. Rogers said he was pleased with the new cells’ flexibility and thinness but said that they offered another even more critical advantage. “That the technology is rollable and transparent is important,” he said. “But cost is the paramount consideration for a lot of solar applications, which have to be low-cost per watt generated.” The technology is producing cells that are often only two microns thick (a micron is one-millionth of a meter). “Thinner allows cheaper,” he said. | Solar Energy;Durham (NC);Silicon;Science and Technology;Carr Joe;Rogers John A.;greenbiz |
ny0068497 | [
"sports",
"football"
] | 2014/12/26 | Cardinals May Start Lindley at Quarterback Again | During the brief portion of the Arizona Cardinals’ practice that was open to reporters, quarterback Ryan Lindley was working with the No. 1 unit. Multiple reports suggested that Coach Bruce Arians planned to start Lindley on Sunday at San Francisco. Arians, who had said that the rookie Logan Thomas would start, did not talk to reporters Thursday. The Cardinals’ offensive coordinator, Harold Goodwin, said, “I guess we’ll see on Sunday.” Lindley started in a 35-6 loss to Seattle last weekend. He was filling in for Drew Stanton, who has a sprained knee. | Football;Arizona Cardinals;Ryan Lindley;Logan Thomas |
ny0295526 | [
"us"
] | 2016/12/28 | Online Petitions Take Citizen Participation to New Levels. But Do They Work? | Online petitions are all over the place. Some are political ( like one asking members of the Electoral College to vote for Hillary Clinton as president instead of Donald J. Trump); others are unearthly ( like one asking that “Star Wars: The Old Republic” series be shown on Netflix). That first petition drew 4.9 million signatures on Change.org. Nonetheless, members of the Electoral College voted for Mr. Trump on Dec. 19. The second petition drew over 123,000 names. There has been a proliferation of these petitions — Change.org has more than 100 million users in 196 countries — but are they effective? Do the intended recipients, often policy makers or elected leaders, pay attention? Worldwide, Change.org users claim one victory per hour, A.J. Walton, a spokesman for the online petition forum, said in an interview. Among them: persuading Arlington National Cemetery and other military cemeteries to bury members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots , female aviators in World War II, and getting Florida transportation officials to install barriers between roads and lakes, ponds and canals to reduce the number of crashes that result in drownings. Image On the Change.org website, more than 1,000 petitions are started in the United States each day, according to the company. In the case of the Electoral College petition, Mr. Walton said the person who started it, Daniel Brezenoff, was able to generate widespread interest and raise more than $250,000 for his cause. That a petition did not produce the desired outcome does not mean it failed, he added. “Was he victorious? No,” Mr. Walton said, referring to Mr. Brezenoff. “Was he successful? I would say yes.” Those who start a petition can deliver printed copies to the intended recipient. Those targeted do not receive emails every time a person signs, but they are often alerted by email that there is a petition directed at them. The biggest benefit from a petition is raised awareness, Jason Del Gandio , a professor of communications and social movements at Temple University in Philadelphia, said in an interview. “In some ways it’s just the updated version of the letter-writing campaign to a representative that has been going on for years,” he said. Successful petition drives do not exist in a vacuum, he added in an email. “No president is going to do an about-face on a major policy because of 20,000 signatures,” he wrote. “But coupling that petition with other tactics like protests, rallies, phone calls, face-to-face lobbying, a well-organized media plan and community outreach creates an environment in which the goals of the signatories can become reality.” Beyond seeking change, petitions serve other important functions, such as mobilizing supporters and reinforcing views, Gerald Benjamin , a political scientist and director of the Benjamin Center for Public Policy Initiatives at the State University of New York at New Paltz, said in an interview. The effectiveness of a petition drive depends on how many signatures are collected, who is signing and whether those being petitioned are in a position to make changes, he said. A petition with 300 signatures, for instance, would carry greater weight if it was aimed at a city council member, who would have fewer constituents than a member of Congress. Still, lawmakers on all levels pay attention to petitions because they demonstrate “either existing organizational strength or the ability to organize,” Scott Payne, who worked as a legislative assistant in Congress, said in an interview. Mr. Payne, who also worked as an organizer for NationBuilder.com , a software company that among other things helps clients gather supporters and donors, said congressional staff members knew that if petitioners did not get a response, they could take their case to the news media. A decade ago, when he worked for Representative John Hall, a Democrat from the Hudson Valley, the office received 5,000 emails and letters a week. Online petitions can take that level of communication to a larger scale by amassing signatures quickly and easily. “Congressional offices are seeing a river of mail coming into their offices,” Mr. Payne said. “Petitions add a garden hose to that.” Digital petitions are popularly used to build databases of names, emails and phone numbers of those who can be called on to act or donate. “It’s moved from an organizing effort to an intelligence-gathering operation,” he said. That granular level of detail also allows organizations to direct ads to supporters on Facebook. Jeb Ory, chief executive of Phone2Action , which relies on technology to help those who want to reach their lawmakers, said digital participation has helped amplify the voices of citizens. “All it takes is a handful of tweets and Facebook posts for lawmakers to realize there are real people in the community who care about these issues,” he said. “I think technology has done an amazing job of making these decision-makers and policy-makers accessible to the average person.” | US Politics;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Change.org;Social Media;Social Trends |
ny0066522 | [
"business",
"international"
] | 2014/06/12 | Alibaba to Buy Remaining UCWeb Shares | BEIJING — Alibaba Group Holding said on Wednesday it would buy all of the remaining shares of the mobile browser company UCWeb in the biggest merger in Chinese Internet history, as the e-commerce giant steps up its spending spree ahead of a listing in the United States. Alibaba’s latest deal, on the heels of a string of investments that already total $4.8 billion in the past six months, will be larger than Baidu’s $1.9 billion acquisition of 91 Wireless last year, Alibaba said. Alibaba’s investment in UCWeb emphasizes the company’s push to do more business on mobile in China, the world’s biggest smartphone market. But rival Tencent Holdings, China’s biggest listed Internet firm, dominates smartphone screens with its near-ubiquitous mobile messaging app WeChat, a situation Alibaba executives have publicly railed against. “This integration will create the biggest merger in the history of China’s Internet,” Alibaba said on its microblog, referring to the UCWeb deal. Alibaba already held about a 66 percent stake in UCWeb, according to its May I.P.O. filing. It and UCWeb will form the UCWeb Mobile Business Group, responsible for Internet browsers, search services, location-based services, the mobile gaming platform, mobile application distribution and mobile literature services, UCWeb said in a statement. Yu Yongfu, the chief executive of UCWeb, will act as chairman of the business group and become part of Alibaba’s “strategic decision-making committee,” Alibaba said. Alibaba is preparing for an I.P.O. that could value the company as high as $150 billion, according to analyst estimates. The UCWeb deal will mainly be done using Alibaba’s stock with a smaller part as cash, Alibaba said. UCWeb said the mobile search service had a market share of more than 20 percent. | Alibaba.com;China;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry |
ny0261961 | [
"sports",
"soccer"
] | 2011/06/23 | Chelsea Names Manager | André Villas-Boas, who has only two seasons of top-flight managerial experience, was hired as Chelsea’s seventh manager in eight years under its billionaire Russian owner, Roman Abramovich. Villas-Boas, 33, is fresh from guiding Porto to Portuguese and Europa League titles. ¶ The Mexican club Puebla signed the American forward DaMarcus Beasley. Beasley, 29, just completed a season with the German club Hannover 96. | Soccer;UEFA Champions League (Soccer);Chelsea Football Club;Abramovich Roman;Villas-Boas Andre;Coaches and Managers;Chelsea (Soccer Team) |
ny0056542 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2014/09/17 | Monk Parrots Nestle Nicely in Queens and Beyond | Stuck with two cockatiels and a lonesome love bird in a cage in Liz Lynch’s sunroom in Howard Beach, Queens, Elvis the parrot seems like just another ordinary pet shop purchase. But outside Ms. Lynch’s windows are signs that he is not: There is the nest atop a utility pole he fell from last year, and there is Kennedy International Airport, the destination for Elvis’s forebears, imported in crates to be sold as pets. “They would get out of the terminals where they were shipped,” said Ms. Lynch, 60, whose father worked at the airport, “and they adapted.” Young Elvis, who has a permanently disabled wing, is among the latest generation of monk parrots to take root in Queens, a borough known to embrace those from other shores. Queens is not the only place the tropical green birds have become firmly entrenched. Fifty years after exotic bird importers began carting them here from their native South America, the parrots have nestled into other neighborhoods in the city and beyond. The best guess on their citywide population is around 550, though biologists say bird counts often capture just a tenth of their true totals. The parrots have set up colonies in at least 10 states, including Florida, Texas, Illinois and Oregon. They dappled European skies, breeding in England and Spain. “Chances are they’ve got inroads in Asia that we just don’t get reports of,” said Frank W. Grasso, a scientist at Brooklyn College who has studied the parrots for 12 years. “They have a kind of resilience that allows them to colonize lots of locations, a lot like human beings.” But they clearly feel at home in Queens. They have raised their young here. Survived epic storms. And steadily increased their numbers. “When the sun starts coming up, you hear them chirping and chirping,” Stanley Rea, 58, said as he made his predawn rounds delivering newspapers last week on the street where Elvis lives. Image Elvis, left, is among the latest generation of monk parrots to take root in Queens. Credit Ángel Franco/The New York Times “The way they build their nests is amazing,” Mr. Rea said. “They pluck branches from one tree and they fly to their nests and they set them in there. It’s pretty cool.” Ornithologists think so, too. Of 320 parrot species worldwide, the monks — so named for the way their gray-and-green plumage paints a hood over their heads — are the only ones that forgo tree hollows to build their own nests: huge, multichambered shelters people compare to condominiums. They live there all year long. They have a capacity to mimic, but mostly call to one another in a high-pitched chatter that can rattle people’s nerves. They can live for 30 years. Of the roughly 30 species of parrots now breeding in the United States, only monks colonize in colder climates, and thus are “the only ones in New York City,” said Stephen Pruett-Jones, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, who has studied them in Hyde Park for 25 years. The first published citing of the species (Myiopsitta monachus) in the wild in America was in New York in 1967, he said. Newspaper accounts put them in Chicago the following year, and in Florida in 1969. By 1970, there was the odd parrot sighting in New York: a few at Riis Park, a handful in the Rockaways, some more on Staten Island. A nest, but no birds, was found in Central Park, in a broken floodlight behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their locations were pinpointed, but it was less clear how they got here. No biologist believes they flew here on their own. Some take Ms. Lynch’s view: They escaped from the airport. Others see less swashbuckling beginnings: Owners sick of their rasping cries set them free. Marc Morrone, who owns Parrots of the World, a pet store in Rockville Centre, on Long Island, says neither explanation is valid. The airport story is an “old wives’ tale,” he said, because shipping containers do not tend to break, and the birds make “wonderful” pets, so why would anyone set them free? Besides, he said, monk parrots that have lived in the wild are not the same as the pet store variety. “The ones we sell as pets are domesticated,” Mr. Morrone said. “They don’t think like the wild birds do. They are smaller than the wild birds. With a domesticated animal, we control its genes.” Indeed, the wild parrots, with their acute social skills, have expanded their turf, locally and nationwide, said Dr. John W. Rowden, an ornithologist with the National Audubon Society, who cited data from the organization’s Christmas bird count. Today in Brooklyn, their pile-of-twig nests are built in the iron gates of Green-Wood Cemetery. They have made homes in Upper Manhattan and amid the trees in Riverside Park. They are in Whitestone and Flushing, Queens. They have built nests in Edgewater, N.J., in the slopes along River Road, an undulating bicycle path in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge, said Corey Finger, of Forest Hills, Queens, a co-owner of the birding blog 10,000 Birds. But Queens has extended the birds perhaps the biggest welcome. State Senator Joseph P. Addabbo Jr., who can see one of their nests from the windows of his district office in Howard Beach, is pushing two bills he introduced in 2010 to protect the parrots (also known as parakeets), though neither has passed. One would put them in a protected category. The other would require their nests be handled with care if they have to be moved. The senator says seeing the “green, rather large, rather unique-sounding parakeet” among pigeons fascinates New Yorkers. Image The nest atop a utility pole in Howard Beach that Elvis fell from. Credit Ángel Franco/The New York Times However, not everyone is as enamored of them. In Argentina, “they are reported to be an agricultural pest,” Dr. Pruett-Jones said. In this country, they are considered a “nuisance species,” he said, and have caused economic trouble in Florida, Texas and elsewhere because they build nests around heat-emitting transformers atop utility poles. Several states, including California, have outlawed parrot breeding and importing them as pets. In New York, too, nests have caused transformers to catch fire, said Michael S. Clendenin, a spokesman for Con Edison. But crews that service the power lines now take extra care. “They’ve learned to work around them,” Mr. Clendenin said. “If there are chicks or eggs in there, they’ll hire a contractor to take it down appropriately.” The ready heat supply has helped the parrots survive in New York as well as backyard gardens, the parrots’ smorgasbord. They eat grass blades, dandelion seeds, holly berries, native leaf and fruit buds or suburban ornamental fruits like crab apples. In the winter, they help themselves at backyard bird feeders. They feed their young insects. On 99th Street in Howard Beach — a street along a canal leading from Jamaica Bay — Mr. Rea said there seemed to be fewer pests since the parrots gained a foothold. As Mr. Rea drove, he passed several nests, including the one Elvis lived in until a year ago, when Alex Breviario, 34, discovered him limping in the street beneath his nest, scooped him up and gave him to Ms. Lynch. As Ms. Lynch told Elvis’s story, she recounted her father’s tale of finding a crate full of parakeets on an airport road. He took it home. The following Monday he returned it, but not before Ms. Lynch let the birds out to fly all over the house for the weekend. (She is careful to say that they were all rounded up and put back in the crate.) “They got here from J.F.K.,” Ms. Lynch said. “That’s how they started.” If her father found one crate full of parrots gone astray, there had to be other such mishaps. Friends who worked at Pan Am tended to have escaped parrots as pets, she said. Elvis, in his cage by the windows facing his relatives in the nest outside, was speaking, too. “He calls to them,” Ms. Lynch said. “They talk to him. And if he’s in a mood, he won’t stop.” | Birds;Queens;Pet |
ny0168675 | [
"business"
] | 2006/06/08 | A Defunct Camera Didn't Die, It Just Came Back as a Rival | While Sony is a newcomer to the market for digital single-lens reflex cameras, there is much that is familiar about its first offering. The lens mount and many mechanical parts of the Sony Alpha DSLR-A100 come from a discontinued camera made by Konica Minolta, which recently abandoned the camera business. Sony, however, says that it has used its extensive expertise in electronics to completely revamp and improve the camera's sensors and microprocessors. The A100 will be available next month with an 18- to 70-millimeter zoom lens for about $1,000. Buyers who don't want the lens can save about $100. Other lenses and flashes are also on the way, including three high-end lenses developed by Carl Zeiss of Germany. In addition to being fully compatible with most Konica Minolta Maxxum mount lenses, the A100 has an improved version of a technology pioneered by Konica Minolta that minimizes blurring at low shutter speeds or when using telephoto lenses. From Sony's engineers, the camera gained an image processor that analyzes dark and bright areas of photos and automatically adjusts exposures to prevent details from disappearing. IAN AUSTEN | Sony Corp;Cameras |
ny0026779 | [
"sports",
"football"
] | 2013/01/18 | Arizona Cardinals Hire Bruce Arians as Coach | The Arizona Cardinals filled the N.F.L.’s final head-coaching vacancy by hiring Bruce Arians, Indianapolis’s offensive coordinator. Arians, 60, was 9-3 as the Colts’ interim head coach while Chuck Pagano was undergoing treatment for leukemia last season. | Football;Bruce Arians;Arizona Cardinals;Job Recruiting and Hiring |
ny0195928 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2009/10/27 | Karadzic Refuses to Appear on First Day of His Trial | THE HAGUE — On the first day of his trial, Radovan Karadzic , the former Bosnian Serb leader who stands accused of genocide against Bosnia’s Muslim population, refused to appear in court on Monday and sent word once again that he wanted more time to prepare his defense in proceedings that aim to cover three years of warfare and widespread brutality against civilians. With no lawyers present to represent Mr. Karadzic, a potentially historic moment — the trial of the most senior Bosnian Serb leader called to account for the horrors of the 1990s — fell flat. The presiding judge, a soft-spoken jurist from South Korea, ended the session in less than 20 minutes but warned that the trial would continue on Tuesday anyway. Even from his cell, Mr. Karadzic, a former psychiatrist turned extreme Serbian nationalist, managed to distress a number of the victims’ families. More than 160 people had made the 24-hour trek by bus from Bosnia to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, and part of the group watched through the bulletproof glass of the public gallery. As the short session closed, many in the group shouted in anger and frustration. Munira Subasic, one of the organizers of the group, said the majority had to return to Bosnia during the night because they had no money for hotel rooms. Several women who said they had lost husbands and sons in the war said they felt betrayed by the court. The judge, O-gon Kwon, last week wrote a private letter to Mr. Karadzic, asking him to reconsider his position not to attend. Mr. Karadzic had announced his absence in a letter to the court, after he lost his appeal requesting more preparation time. The judge, who sat on the bench that struggled with the often unruly Slobodan Milosevic , the former Serbian president, has ample experience with chaos in the courtroom and evidently tried to reach out to Mr. Karadzic. Reading from his letter to Mr. Karadzic, the judge stressed that “we will do our utmost to protect your rights.” He added that Mr. Karadzic could ask for extra time when needed for cross-examining witnesses, for example. But the judge also hinted that his absence could force the court to impose a lawyer, stripping Mr. Karadzic of his right to defend himself. A panel of four international judges is trying Mr. Karadzic, 64, who is viewed as one of the main architects of what was called the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia — that is, the violent removal of non-Serbs from a range of towns and villages during the 1992-95 war. He faces 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including two counts of genocide. On Monday, a lawyer for Mr. Karadzic, Marko Sladojevic, said his client would not be in court on Tuesday. He said Mr. Karadzic was working his way through more than a million pages of prosecution documents, adding, “He wants a trial and tell his side of the story but he still has months of work and does not want to commit legal suicide.” | Karadzic Radovan;War Crimes Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity;United Nations;Hague (Netherlands);Milosevic Slobodan |
ny0098889 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2015/06/08 | Blue Jays Beat Astros With 9th-Inning Rally | Chris Colabello extended his hitting streak with a game-winning two-run single that capped a ninth-inning rally, and the Toronto Blue Jays beat the visiting Houston Astros, 7-6, on Sunday for their fifth straight win. Jose Bautista hit two solo homers and Russell Martin added a two-run shot for Toronto, which scored three times in the ninth to complete a three-game sweep. Colabello’s game-ending single extended his hitting streak to 17 games, the longest active run in the majors. Liam Hendriks (1-0) pitched two innings for the win. Luke Gregerson (2-1) recorded his second blown save in 17 chances. RAYS 3, MARINERS 1 Chris Archer became the first pitcher in more than 100 years to reach double digits in strikeouts without a walk in three straight starts, leading Tampa Bay to a win at Seattle. Archer (7-4) struck out 11 in seven innings. The statistics agency Stats found no other pitcher with such a string of starts in its research dating to 1914. PHILLIES 6, GIANTS 4 Pinch-hitter Jeff Francoeur drove in two runs with a two-out double in the seventh inning to help Philadelphia beat visiting San Francisco and stave off a series sweep. Freddy Galvis led off the inning with a single. After another hit and a double play, Ben Revere worked a walk to set the stage for Francoeur. ROYALS 4, RANGERS 3 Salvador Perez hit a solo homer with two outs in the eighth inning, lifting Kansas City over visiting Texas. Perez hit his eighth homer, sending a pitch from Keone Kela (4-2) into the Royals’ bullpen. Wade Davis (3-1) picked up the victory, working around Prince Fielder’s double in the eighth. Greg Holland pitched a perfect ninth for his ninth save in 10 opportunities. CUBS 6, NATIONALS 3 Kris Bryant tripled, doubled, singled and scored twice as visiting Chicago sent Washington to its eighth loss in 10 games. Jason Motte pitched a perfect ninth for his first save since 2012, when he led the National League with 42 for St. Louis before being injured. Closer Hector Rondon threw a perfect eighth a day after Manager Joe Maddon said he might put him in some lower-pressure situations to become settled. RED SOX 7, ATHLETICS 4 Rusney Castillo hit a solo homer and a run-scoring single during a seven-run rally in the eighth inning that sent Boston over visiting Oakland for a three-game sweep. Xander Bogaerts delivered a go-ahead two-run double. The Red Sox had eight hits in the comeback before the ambidextrous Pat Venditte, Oakland’s fifth pitcher of the inning, got the last out. TIGERS 6, WHITE SOX 4 Yoenis Cespedes and J. D. Martinez homered in the sixth inning to power Detroit to a win in Chicago. The Tigers have won consecutive games after dropping eight straight, their longest skid since 2005. Alfredo Simon (6-3) struck out seven and allowed four runs — one earned — in eight innings. Joakim Soria earned his 16th save in 18 chances. PIRATES 3, BRAVES 0 Gerrit Cole pitched seven strong innings to win his fourth straight start, Starling Marte had a two-run single in the three-run fifth inning, and Pittsburgh won at Atlanta. Cole, the 2011 first overall draft pick, became the first Pirate since Emil Yde in 1924-25 with 30 victories in 53 or fewer career starts. Cole (9-2) allowed six hits, three walks and struck out seven, throwing 74 of his 116 pitches for strikes. REDS 4, PADRES 0 Jay Bruce homered twice to drive in all four runs, and Johnny Cueto earned his first win in almost a month, leading Cincinnati over visiting San Diego. Cueto and relievers J. J. Hoover and Aroldis Chapman combined to retire the last 15 batters, helping the Reds avoid a sweep. Cueto (4-4) gave up four hits in seven innings, striking out nine and walking two. It was his first win since May 9. ORIOLES 7, INDIANS 3 Matt Wieters hit his first home run in more than a year, and Bud Norris won in his return from the disabled list as Baltimore prevailed at Cleveland. Adam Jones also went deep to help the Orioles take two of three in the series. MARLINS 3, ROCKIES 2 Adeiny Hechavarria hit a two-out homer in the 10th inning, lifting Miami to a win in Colorado. Hechavarria drove a slider from reliever Boone Logan (0-2) into the trees beyond center field. TWINS 2, BREWERS 0 Mike Pelfrey pitched eight strong innings, his longest outing in three years, and Minnesota avoided a series sweep by beating visiting Milwaukee. Eddie Rosario and Eduardo Escobar drove in runs for the Twins, who otherwise struggled with runners on base. Glen Perkins worked a scoreless ninth for his major-league-leading 21st save in 21 chances. CARDINALS 4, DODGERS 2 Jhonny Peralta singled home the go-ahead run in the eighth inning and homered, leading St. Louis to a victory in Los Angeles. Yasiel Puig committed a costly fielding error during a three-run Cardinals rally after Matt Carpenter had drawn a leadoff walk from reliever Adam Liberatore. | Baseball;Blue Jays;Astros |
ny0203729 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2009/08/24 | Eric Pagan, Bouncer at East Village Lounge, Is Killed | A 42-year-old bouncer was shot to death, and two other men were hospitalized with gunshot wounds, after a fight broke out early Sunday outside a bar and lounge in the East Village, according to witnesses and the police. The shooting erupted at 4:25 a.m. outside Forbidden City, a bar at 212 Avenue A, between 13th and 14th Streets. Police officers arrived minutes later, and emergency medical workers took the three men to Bellevue Hospital Center. The bouncer, identified as Eric Pagan of 725 Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive in the East Village, was pronounced dead there. Based on preliminary accounts from witnesses, the authorities said it appeared that he had intervened in a fight on the sidewalk outside the bar. Two other men — who the police said may have been inside the club earlier — were listed in stable condition: Salvador Moran, 30, who was shot in the right hand, and Robert Calbo, 31, who was grazed in the neck. Witnesses told the police that several suspects, including the gunman, fled in a white Nissan minivan. There were no arrests reported by Sunday evening. The manager, Ron Ancheta, 31, said in a phone interview that Mr. Pagan had worked sporadically at Forbidden City since it opened in 2001. Mr. Pagan was not working Saturday night, but checked in anyway, as was his habit, Mr. Ancheta said. Mr. Ancheta said he was closing the bar with several other employees when gunfire broke out. He raced outside, he said, and saw Mr. Pagan’s body. “He was laying right in the middle of the street, face up,” Mr. Ancheta said. “There were so many witnesses, probably around 10 to 15 people surrounding his body.” The witnesses reported that a fight had broken out between the men in the van and customers exiting the bar after the van brushed against some of the customers, Mr. Ancheta said. Mr. Pagan was bald and muscular, had many tattoos and went by the nickname Taz. He had a MySpace page on which he described himself as a single father and an electrician. At the apartment he shared with his daughter, 14, and a stepson, 17 — their mother died in 1995 — Mr. Pagan’s mother, Ellena Pagan, 65, called her son “a good man, a good son, a good father, a hard-working man.” She recalled that her son loved to watch wrestling, play video games and take his children shopping. Ms. Pagan said she learned the bad news after she returned from church in the afternoon. She said of the gunman: “He took away a good person. He has to repent, confess his crime and pay for what he took away. His heart will shake until he knows what he did was wrong.” Several residents called Mr. Pagan a fixture in the neighborhood. “He was the nicest guy,” said Dina Tarhan, 44, who said she had met him in passing. John Cartier, 57, who is the president of the board of the condominium association at 503-509 East 13th Street, the apartment complex above Forbidden City, called it “one of the better places,” and said he did not know of any previous violence there. As night fell, more than 100 people gathered at the spot where Mr. Pagan had been shot. They remembered him with bouquets of flowers, lighted candles and photographs. | Forbidden City Manhattan NY Nightclub;Murders and Homicides;Bars and Nightclubs;East Village Manhattan |
ny0065720 | [
"technology"
] | 2014/06/09 | Stars of Vine and Instagram Get Advertising Deals | Good thing social media did not exist during the era of “Mad Men.” It might have put Don and Peggy out of business. Brands and advertisers, looking for ways to reach audiences beyond television screens and magazine pages, are turning to people with many followers on social media and paying them to pitch products online. The social media stars, in turn, are finding that working as a conduit for a brand can be quite lucrative — sometimes generating more than enough money to live on. Robby Ayala, for example, dropped out of law school to pursue his career as a full-time video creator on the video service Vine, publishing several goofy six-second movies to his 2.6 million followers each day. Last summer, he got a call from Niche , a company that wanted to hire him to make a short commercial for GroupMe, a messaging application, and post it for his followers to see. Mr. Ayala, a natural ham, made a short comedy skit of himself using GroupMe to text his friends a selfie photo. He accepted the job, and others like it, which pay several thousand dollars, and he has not looked back since. “I saw how it could be more of a profession than a hobby,” he said. “I wanted to be a part of it all.” Mr. Ayala and others like him have joined a long line of innovators who have found clever ways to build businesses on top of existing websites and platforms — often before the services themselves have figured out how to make money. The early days of the iPhone, Facebook and Twitter, for example, were defined by the applications built by developers for those products and services. This latest incarnation follows the tradition. Only this time, advertisers are tapping popular personalities and characters on Vine, owned by Twitter, to make microcommercials in the same spirit and style that made the social media account popular in the first place. Mr. Ayala made a name for himself on Vine by filming humorous skits with his friends and family that made use of his boyish good looks and physical comedy. In November, Mr. Ayala joined Niche full time, to work as the company’s creative partnership manager, which he described as helping other Vine users polish their content and make videos for advertisers. In many ways, Niche has become a talent scouting service and advertising agency rolled up into one — it matches social media stars with marketers and advertisers who want to reach the young users who inhabit those platforms full time. Those users then make content — like Instagram images or Vine shorts — around a company or product, like baby clothes or a sports drink, and post it to their accounts for their followers to like and comment on. Niche says that it has close to 3,000 social media accounts, with a total reach of 500 million followers. The agency has worked with roughly 70 brands, including Home Depot, General Electric and Gap Kids. Liz Jones, executive vice president for digital marketing at Relativity EuropaCorp Distribution, a media company that produces feature films and television shows, said that Niche was just one outlet of many that she used to market her company’s offerings. Ms. Jones turned to Niche recently when she wanted to market a coming children’s movie, “Earth to Echo.” The company flew a handful of popular users on Vine and Instagram to meet the stars of the film and post about it on their various social media accounts. The company wanted to reach young users “in a way that’s really in their world, rather than just with our regular ads,” she said. And she wanted to make sure that “Echo,” which had no boldface-name stars, did not go unnoticed by her target demographic. Image Rob Fishman, a founder of Niche, in its New York offices. Niche matches social media stars with marketers and advertisers. Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times “I’m a big believer in that influencer marketer,” she said, “or someone telling you that something is cool and that you should like it.” The resulting Vines and Instagrams directly correlated to spikes in traffic to the film’s Wikipedia page and views of the trailer on YouTube, she said, and that is what she had hoped for. “That’s all I wanted to do at that point,” she said. “Just spark their interest so that if they don’t know about the movie, they look it up and are talking about it.” Rob Fishman, one of the founders of Niche, described the service as a “native ad factory,” referring to the kinds of advertisements that look somewhat similar to the content around them. “It’s not canned content; it looks and feels like the native content in their native feeds,” he said. Native advertising is one of the fastest-growing types of advertising, especially on mobile devices. The format has raised questions from federal regulators about how paid content that blurs the line between editorial content and ads should be identified to users. The government already requires that sponsored posts, paid search results and promoted posts must be denoted as such, but has not yet set additional guidelines. Many expect that it will do so, to help consumers distinguish between regular posts and advertisements. In the case of Niche, posts usually include a comment or hashtag referring to the company they are promoting for their followers, but there is no mention that the video is an advertisement. Mr. Fishman said that the company encouraged social media celebrities who participate in promotions to use language like “I’m partnering with” or “teaming up with” or even hashtags like #sponsored or #ad to help consumers distinguish between them. Jethro Ames, 35, who lives in San Diego, described himself as a “traditional print designer” who built a career on print ads and logos when he started making stop-motion videos and posting them on Vine . Eventually, the demand for his stylistic Vines outpaced his traditional print work, and he quit to work on social media full time. He even transformed the two-car garage in his home into a production studio for his social media creations. Many of his videos are posted by the brand account he works for, like Home Depot, making it clear they are promoting the company. “People don’t sit around watching prime-time TV waiting for ads to appear anymore,” he said. “They watch online or even through the Twittersphere. It’s powerful.” Mr. Fishman says that campaigns through Niche pay a broad range of fees, from $500 to as much as $50,000, but the average payout for a Vine campaign ranges in the mid-four figures. Mr. Ames declined to say how much he earned, but said people posting advertisements on Vine can make six figures a year, and some as much as $300,000. Niche itself makes money, too, Mr. Fishman said. The company, which has a few more than a dozen employees split between San Francisco and New York, has generated more than $1.5 million in revenue since its inception last June and expects to bring in over $4 million by the end of the year. The company recently raised $2.5 million in venture financing from SoftTech, Lerer Ventures and SV Angel, among others, at an $11 million valuation. Mr. Fishman said he and Darren Lachtman, Niche’s other co-founder, hoped to create the future of advertising on mobile phones. Companies “don’t have to pay to hire Don Draper” for expensive print and television ads, he said. “They can come to us to create it.” | advertising,marketing;Vine;Instagram;Social Media;Online advertising |
ny0190452 | [
"us"
] | 2009/05/08 | Firefighters Work to Contain Calif. Blaze | SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — A wildfire on the hills near this oceanside city was only 10 percent contained on Thursday, and firefighters struggled to pen in the flames, which had destroyed 75 houses since they began on Tuesday. Faltering winds slowed the fire’s spread through the day, but officials worried that the blaze could worsen as the humidity dropped, temperatures rose and the evening winds returned. “Firefighters have been building lines in pieces around the perimeter,” said Mike Carr, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “Now they are working to connect the dots.” The fire has burned about 2,793 acres, and 15,000 people have been evacuated from the area, which is known for its sprawling mansions and ocean views. A mandatory evacuation order was in effect for about seven square miles from the Santa Ynez foothills to just outside downtown Santa Barbara, the police said. Hotels in the area were near capacity, with families unable to return to their homes. Mr. Carr said strong winds expected Thursday evening could threaten 3,500 homes and 100 businesses in the area. At a news conference here Thursday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that the state’s budget woes would not affect efforts to fight the fire but that the blaze presented a “great challenge.” “Seventy-five percent of the response cost” would be covered by the federal government, Mr. Schwarzenegger said, after his declaration of a state of emergency on Wednesday. “This is very, very helpful for us,” he said, “because, as you know, we have a financial crisis in California. But I want to reassure you all that even though we have this crisis, we will not be short of money when it comes to fighting this fire.” More than 9,000 elementary and high school students were evacuated from schools in the county on Thursday, said Barbara Keyani, a spokeswoman for Santa Barbara’s two largest school districts. Ms. Keyani said 12 schools remained closed. Ten firefighters have been injured, officials said, although most of the injuries were minor. No injuries were reported among evacuees. At 2 a.m. Thursday, as the winds that had fanned flames rapidly Wednesday afternoon slowed to fitful gusts, a few hundred firefighters slept between shifts in trucks and tents at the city fairgrounds. Sixty or so lay in sleeping bags scattered like blue cocoons over the trim lawn near their command post. The air smelled of acidic, sweet wood smoke, and ash flakes fluttered to the ground. Crews from across Southern California had come to assist, said Capt. David Sadecki of the Santa Barbara County Fire Department. Geege Ostroff, 65, walking out of a Red Cross shelter in a high school down the road, said he and his wife, Carole, decided to evacuate ahead of orders on Tuesday, when they saw smoke plumes and orange flames near their home at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, where he is a caretaker. “We knew that with the winds what they were, this would grow,” Mr. Ostroff said. He said he was sure his house had burned. “Sometimes I think it’s there,” he said, as he held his hat in a gust of wind, “then I realize it’s gone. I miss the stupidest things now, like my coffee grinder. I want to be home.” | Fires and Firefighters;California;Santa Barbara (Calif);Forest and Brush Fires |
ny0261198 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2011/06/21 | Marlins Name McKeon, 80, as Interim Manager | MILWAUKEE The newest manager in baseball is older than Willie Mays. He is older than Wilford Brimley and Casey Kasem and Yoko Ono and Regis Philbin. His first job as a major league manager came in 1973 , before any of his Florida Marlins players were born. When he managed his first game in the minor leagues, in 1956, the Brooklyn Dodgers were the reigning champions. Jack McKeon, 80, was introduced in Miami Gardens on Monday as the interim manager of the Marlins, the team he guided to the World Series title in 2003. McKeon, who was a special assistant to the team’s owner, Jeffrey Loria, will spend the rest of this season as the caretaker of a team whose tailspin caused its previous manager, Edwin Rodriguez, to resign on Sunday before a game at Tampa Bay. “I was shocked,” said Rays Manager Joe Maddon, whose team swept the Marlins last weekend. “I had talked to Edwin when they first got there, and I really like this guy. There’s only so many guys that do this, and when a guy leaves, it bothers me. You just hate to see it, man. It’s a bad day in the frat.” Then again, Maddon was reminded, the fraternity once again includes the colorful McKeon, who is so fond of cigars that he posed with one for the cover of his autobiography . Maddon laughed as he extended his metaphor. “Jack’s cigar smoking, sitting at the front door, taking roll after curfew,” Maddon said. McKeon becomes the second-oldest manager in major league history, behind only Connie Mack, who was 87 in his last year as manager of the Philadelphia Athletics in 1950. Casey Stengel was nearly 75 when he managed his final game for the Mets in 1965. “I hope I’m still moving around great at 80 years old — that’s my No. 1 goal,” Yankees Manager Joe Girardi, 46, said in Cincinnati on Monday. “God bless him.” Ron Roenicke, the manager of the Milwaukee Brewers, played for San Diego’s World Series team in 1984, which McKeon built as the general manager. Roenicke is 54 and said McKeon amazed him by returning to the dugout. “I don’t know how you do that at that age,” Roenicke said. “To have the energy to go out and do the things you have to do, every single day, I don’t know how you do that.” This is the second time the Marlins have reached for McKeon at midseason. They stormed to the playoffs after hiring him in May 2003, a season capped by McKeon’s bold decision to start Josh Beckett on three days’ rest in Game 6 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium. Beckett fired a shutout to win the championship. “You believe me now?” McKeon told reporters that night, drenched in Champagne after the victory. “Anything can happen.” Fair point, but a return engagement seemed highly unlikely. McKeon managed two more seasons for the Marlins, going 83-79 both times, but the next three managers the team hired — Girardi, Fredi Gonzalez and Rodriguez — had never managed in the majors before. The Marlins seemed comfortable with young managers leading young rosters. Yet McKeon stayed involved with the front office — his colorful sweaters spiced up the lobby at the annual winter meetings — and his friends were not surprised he took the job. “He’s a go-get guy,” said Bob Uecker, 76, the Hall of Fame broadcaster for the Brewers. “He’s always charged up.” Uecker was a catcher for the 1956 Boise Braves , a Class C team in the Pioneer League, when he met McKeon, who was the 25-year-old player/manager for the Missoula Timberjacks . “They had this little old wooden ballpark, and they had a trap door right behind home plate,” Uecker said. “So at the start of the game, after the Timberjacks would take their infield, they’d go in, put on a dry shirt, and they’d start this song, ‘Hurry Back, Timberjacks,’ and these guys would come running onto the field out of this trap door. “And the song was: ‘I got a ring, I got a house, I got an acre/it would break her little heart if I forsake her/hurry back, Timberjacks!’ So every time he sees me — every time — he says, ‘Sing that song, sing the Timberjack song!’ ” The travel was arduous back then, Uecker said, but of course, McKeon was a much younger man. The Marlins’ schedule will test his endurance immediately. After two more home games with the Angels following Monday’s 2-1 loss, the Marlins fly to Seattle for a series as the home team; a U2 concert is forcing the Marlins to play three home games on the road. In a news conference Monday, the Marlins explained the hire by raving about McKeon’s sharp mind and tireless work ethic. McKeon, who benched the slumping All-Star Hanley Ramirez in his first lineup, said he might manage until he is 95. “Maybe I’m not hip with the Twitter or Facebook or something like that,” McKeon said, according to The Palm Beach Post . “Outside of that, I don’t have any problem with disciplining my kids or disciplining any of these players. “They probably said the same thing about Joe Paterno, and he’s going on 85. I look at it this way: why should experience get penalized?” | Baseball;Florida Marlins;McKeon Jack;Coaches and Managers;Hiring and Promotion |
ny0017214 | [
"sports",
"hockey"
] | 2013/10/15 | Red Wings Defeat Bruins | The backup goalie Jonas Gustavsson stopped 28 shots and led Detroit to a 3-2 win over host Boston. Milan Lucic got his 100th career goal for the Bruins. ■ Jason Pominville’s goal gave visiting Minnesota a 2-1 win over his old team, Buffalo, which fell to 0-6-1 ...Alex Ovechkin scored his sixth goal of the season for Washington in a 4-2 win at home against Edmonton. | Ice hockey;Red Wings;Bruins;Milan Lucic;Jonas Gustavsson |
ny0195967 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2009/10/11 | ArtsWestchester Presents Climate Change as Comics Art | On one wall of the Arts Exchange here, humorous depictions of arctic animals in the midst of global warming include a polar bear playing a grand piano while drifting on a melting glacier. On another wall, a comic strip has a family of four struggling to find a suitable vacation spot as temperature swings turn ordinarily moderate locales into burning-hot and freezing-cold destinations. First shown at the 2008 Fumetto Internationales Comix-Festival , the illustrations are part of an exhibition, through Nov. 10, in the Grand Banking Room of the Arts Exchange, the headquarters of ArtsWestchester. “ ‘Fumetto’ is the Italian word for comics,” said Janet Langsam, executive director of ArtsWestchester. “Literally translated, it means ‘little puff of smoke’ and refers to the speech bubbles, or balloons, that contain the dialogue in a comic strip.” Compelling because of their artistic vision, narrative voice and humor, fumetti have long been a popular form of creative expression in many European countries. While similar to American comic books in that they tell a story over a series of frames, fumetti are known for addressing social and political issues. The nine fumetti on display at the Arts Exchange are reproductions of the winning entries chosen from works submitted by about 1,000 artists and illustrators, representing 30 countries, in the 2008 fumetto festival. The festival, which has been held in Lucerne, Switzerland, for 18 years, is the largest comics competition in Europe. Each year, contestants are asked to create comics addressing a specific theme, and in 2008 it was climate change. The festival was sponsored by Swiss Re, an international reinsurance company, which is also sponsoring the Arts Exchange exhibition. In addition to the competition winners, the gallery is displaying the work of two Westchester artists who answered an open call to create and submit comics illustrations on the same theme. One of them, Adam Zucker, from Ardsley, responded with several pieces, including “Melt,” an acrylic-on-canvas painting that depicts a crying glacier. Among the works by the other artist, Mike D’Ariano of White Plains, is an acrylic-and-marker painting on canvas called “Hummer,” showing a bright yellow S.U.V. siphoning the life out of a bare tree. His painting “Lower” depicts the earth heating up in a microwave oven. “I think of fumetto as serious comics, or comics with a twist of irony,” Ms. Langsam said. “In substance and content, fumetto are different than the comics we’re used to seeing in the United States. They might look similar, but they’re not meant to be Superman and Lois Lane.” Ms. Langsam said she hoped the exhibition would open a dialogue about climate change and sustainability. “It’s definitely a great way to address serious topics,” she said, “using humor and inventiveness to get our attention in a way that statistics can’t.” LAURA JOSEPH MOGIL | Art;Comic Books and Strips;Global Warming;White Plains (NY) |
ny0283085 | [
"business",
"dealbook"
] | 2016/07/07 | Andrew Caspersen Pleads Guilty to Federal Charges in $40 Million Fraud | Andrew Caspersen, a former Wall Street executive and scion of a wealthy family, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to federal charges that he defrauded friends, relatives and a hedge fund billionaire’s foundation of nearly $40 million. Accompanied by his lawyer, Mr. Caspersen, 39, arrived at a federal courthouse in Manhattan to a small crowd of family and friends. Dressed in a dark suit with a bright orange tie, Mr. Caspersen pleaded guilty to one charge of security fraud and one charge of wire fraud, charges that each carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. It represents a steep fall for Mr. Caspersen, an Ivy League-educated financier whose lawyer has argued that a “compulsive gambling addiction and mental illness” prompted him to mastermind a Ponzi-like scheme earlier this year. “The people I harmed were people I cared for the most,” Mr. Caspersen said, reading from a statement. His voice wavered as he stumbled over the last words, “I could not be more sorry or ashamed for my crimes.” Mr. Caspersen’s decision to plead guilty does not come as a surprise, because his lawyer said last month he would not contest the charges. It is unclear, however, whether Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court will use leniency in sentencing Mr. Caspersen by viewing his mental health affliction as a mitigating circumstance. In a plea agreement, federal prosecutors and Mr. Caspersen agreed on a sentencing range of 12 to 16 years in prison, subject to judicial approval. He could also be required to pay a fine of more than $5 million and restitution to victims. In court on Wednesday, Judge Rakoff described the federal sentencing guidelines as “irrational.” The case has riveted Wall Street ever since Mr. Caspersen was arrested at La Guardia Airport in New York on March 26 as he stepped off a plane returning from a vacation with his two young children, his wife and his in-laws. His victims included close friends and acquaintances. Among those he defrauded were his mother and the family of a former girlfriend, Catherine F. MacRae, who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. His mother was in court on Wednesday and spent time talking with him and Christina, his wife. Others entangled in Mr. Caspersen’s fraud included the foundation of Louis Bacon, the hedge fund manager, and Paul J. Taubman’s firm, PJT Partners, where Mr. Caspersen worked while carrying out the scheme. As part of the ruse, Mr. Caspersen created fake email addresses and a fictitious colleague. With a pedigree that included Groton School, Princeton and Harvard Law School, Mr. Caspersen used his network to tap new sources of money for his scheme, which promised investors annual returns of 15 percent through a private-equitylike investment vehicle, prosecutors have said. “I did all this knowing it was wrong,” Mr. Caspersen said on Wednesday in court. In reality, much of the money Mr. Caspersen raised from friends was squandered on wrong-footed bets in the market, Paul Shechtman, Mr. Caspersen’s lawyer, said in a recent interview. Mr. Caspersen traded one-week put options that allowed him to bet on a decline in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. Mr. Caspersen was bold in his bets, telling his broker to trade all the cash in his account each week, his lawyer said. That account held $112.8 million as recently as Feb. 1, which would have been enough for Mr. Caspersen to easily pay back the $38.5 million that he owed to his family and friends. Instead, he continued to gamble the money through all-in bets against the market. The recent attention on Mr. Caspersen recalled the sudden death of his father, Finn M. W. Caspersen, who committed suicide in 2009 at the age of 67. The elder Mr. Caspersen was a noted philanthropist and financier who left behind family trusts and businesses. He had also pledged $30 million to Harvard Law School, where a student center was named in the family’s honor. Over the last decade, the younger Mr. Caspersen squandered more than $20 million of his own money and family inheritance, lured into making trading bets after starting with casino gambling and sports betting, his lawyer said. He added that Mr. Caspersen and his wife recently sold their multimillion-dollar home in Bronxville, N.Y. | Andrew Caspersen;Jed S Rakoff;Hedge fund;PJT Partners;Fraud;Securities fraud |
ny0137722 | [
"sports"
] | 2008/05/07 | Smaller Programs Are Among Hardest Hit in N.C.A.A. Academic Report | When Dick Tomey took over as coach of the San Jose State football team three years ago, he bluntly assessed the lack of programs available to help his players’ schoolwork. “We didn’t have an academic support program to speak of,” Tomey said. Since then, he said, he is proud of the university’s progress in creating an infrastructure to help student-athletes succeed in the classroom. But Tomey’s Spartans were among the hardest hit when the N.C.A.A. released its annual Academic Progress Report on Tuesday. San Jose State lost nine scholarships because of a pattern of poor performance and will have four hours of practice time reduced per week. San Jose State’s academic issues are indicative of what Tomey calls “class warfare” when it comes to smaller colleges trying to find the resources to overcome their academic shortcomings. Of the 37 football programs penalized by the N.C.A.A. on Tuesday, only two were from the six major conferences that comprise the Bowl Championship Series. Washington State lost eight scholarships, and Kansas two. “There’s such a difference between the B.C.S. schools and those who are not,” Tomey said. “I don’t think it’s an intended difference, but it highlights financial things like not being able to throw money at the problem and solve it very quickly.” The N.C.A.A. punished 218 teams Tuesday, handing out sanctions that ranged from warnings to reductions in the amount of practice time, to push those programs focus on academics. According to Myles Brand, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the biggest disappointment came in men’s basketball, which had eight teams from Bowl Championship Series leagues penalized, including U.S.C., Kansas State, Tennessee and Purdue. The men’s basketball overall score was 906, well below the expected minimum of 925, which is the approximate equal of a 60 percent graduation rate. Over all, however, the numbers showed progress virtually across the board, and Brand praised his academic reform movement by saying there has been “measurable progress.” But the grimmest news of the day came from the 26 programs that received stiff penalties and a warning that they could be barred from postseason play next year if they do not improve their scores. Those included the football programs at Temple and San Jose State and the basketball programs at Centenary, New Mexico State and East Carolina. For a program like Temple, however, the release of Tuesday’s numbers did not elicit gloom and doom. The Owls lost two football scholarships because of historical penalties, but Temple Athletic Director Bill Bradshaw said he was braced for their academic turnaround to become a feel-good story. Since Al Golden took over as football coach in 2006, Bradshaw said the university had invested nearly $500,000 in a “complete overhaul” of its academic support system. Bradshaw pointed out that Golden’s first recruiting class had an score of 980 in the progress report, and that this year’s class projected to a score of 975, both easily surpassing the 925 threshold. “All of us at Temple football are proud to say that we have been a part of the greatest academic turnaround in the A.P.R. reform era,” Golden said in a statement. “We inherited a liability and in just a short 29 months made it our single greatest asset.” But that turnaround cost money, which is the struggle for colleges outside major conferences that lack the cash flow from ticket sales and television revenue of bigger programs. “When the A.P.R. first was introduced, I think all of our schools took it to heart and put in plans to face it and to fight it,” said Karl Benson, the commissioner of the Western Athletic Conference. “But I know that we may not have had the same resources that others have had.” He added: “I don’t think it’s a fairness issue. I think we have to recognize the difference and disparity that exist.” | National Collegiate Athletic Assn;College Athletics;Football;Basketball;Athletics and Sports |
ny0225189 | [
"sports",
"football"
] | 2010/10/18 | Deion Branch Helps Patriots Top Ravens in Overtime | Deion Branch gave Patriots fans plenty of reasons to forget Randy Moss, and the team’s embarrassing loss in last year’s playoffs. Branch caught nine passes — the same number Moss had in four games this season — to spearhead a 23-20 comeback win in overtime against the visiting Ravens on Sunday. New England (4-1) acquired Branch, who was the most valuable player for the Patriots when they won the 2005 Super Bowl , from Seattle on Monday, five days after trading Moss to Minnesota. After the game, a triumphant Branch said he and Patriots quarterback Tom Brady had been apart for four years “and I honestly don’t feel we missed a beat.” Patriots Coach Bill Belichick said: “He got open and caught some balls. Let’s not make it too complicated.” The last time these teams played, the Ravens won, 33-14, in the first round of the playoffs. Baltimore led by 24-0 after one quarter that day. On Sunday, Branch helped start a rally after the Patriots fell behind by 20-10, starting with a 5-yard touchdown reception on a pass from Brady four minutes into the fourth quarter. After forcing a punt, New England marched from its 14 to the Baltimore 3 with the help of four catches by Branch. The Patriots finished the drive with a 24-yard field goal by Stephen Gostkowski to tie the score with 1 minute 51 seconds left. “We’ve known each other for a long time, so I think the chemistry’s there,” Brady said. “It will be there.” In overtime, the Ravens (4-2) punted three times and the Patriots twice. Branch caught passes for 23 and 10 yards on the final possession, setting up a winning 35-yard field goal by Gostkowski. Branch finished with 98 receiving yards. “If we see them in the playoffs we will be ready again,” Baltimore linebacker Ray Lewis said. ¶The visiting Dolphins (3-2) pounced on the injury-riddled Packers, wearing out a patchwork defense and winning, 23-20, when Dan Carpenter kicked a 44-yard field goal in overtime. It was the second straight overtime loss for the Packers (3-3), who lost at Washington last week. The Packers, already without six regular players because of injuries, played without four others, including their top pass rusher, Clay Matthews. Aaron Rodgers started for Green Bay one week after sustaining a concussion. Eagles End Falcons’ Streak After the speedy receiver DeSean Jackson was sidelined in a collision, Jeremy Maclin took over, catching touchdown passes of 8 and 83 yards and helping to lead the Eagles to a 31-17 win against the visiting Falcons. The loss ended a four-game win streak for Atlanta (4-2). Kevin Kolb completed 23 of 29 passes for 326 yards in place of the injured Michael Vick. Jackson, before he was sidelined by the hit to his helmet, was unstoppable. He gained 78 yards on three first-quarter touches, scoring on a 31-yard run and a 34-yard pass from Kolb to give Philadelphia (4-2) a 14-0 edge. ¶The Vikings overcame another uneven game by Brett Favre to win, 24-21, against the visiting Cowboys (1-4). Playing with a bad elbow and a scandal hanging over his head — he has to meet with league security Tuesday about his reportedly racy texting — Favre took a bunch of big hits from Dallas and finished 14 for 19 for 118 yards, a touchdown and a turnover. Randy Moss’s first home game since joining the Vikings (2-3) in a trade turned into an afterthought, but Minnesota’s defense and special teams — including a 95-yard kickoff return for a touchdown by Percy Harvin — helped make up for Favre’s unpolished play. Saints Bounce Back The Saints rebounded from a mistake-filled road loss that dumped them into third place in the N.F.C. South, scoring on their first three possessions and getting an unexpected lift from the rookie running back Chris Ivory in a 31-6 victory against the host Buccaneers. The Saints (4-2) amassed 475 yards of offense and did not use their punt team until the fourth quarter. Ivory, playing in place of the injured Reggie Bush and Pierre Thomas, rushed for 158 yards on 15 carries. New Orleans, which began the day next to last in the league in rushing, finished with 212 rushing yards. Tampa Bay (3-2) had won five of seven dating to last season. ¶Alex Smith threw second-half touchdown passes to Michael Crabtree and Vernon Davis and the 49ers finally won their first game, beating the visiting Raiders, 17-9, in a sloppy, penalty-filled game. Frank Gore ran for 149 yards for San Francisco, whose 1-5 start is the franchise’s worst since Bill Walsh’s first team lost its initial seven games in 1979. Sebastian Janikowski kicked three field goals for Oakland (2-4). Long Day for Cutler Matt Hasselbeck threw for a season-best 242 yards and a touchdown and the visiting Seahawks sacked Jay Cutler six times in a 23-20 victory over the Bears. Cutler, who missed last week’s game after being sacked nine times the week before by the Giants, completed just 17 of 39 passes for 290 yards. Seattle (3-2), coming off a bye week, got a needed lift by beating Chicago (4-2), which came into the game tied for the league’s best record. ¶Sam Bradford threw a 38-yard touchdown pass to his fellow rookie Danario Alexander, who was making his N.F.L. debut, to help build a 14-point cushion in the first half of the Rams’ 20-17 victory against the visiting Chargers. One week after being blown out at Detroit, St. Louis (3-3) dominated on both sides of the ball against San Diego (2-4). Mistakes Don’t Cost Colts Peyton Manning threw two touchdown passes and Joseph Addai ran for another as the visiting Colts held off the Redskins, 27-24. Indianapolis (4-2) seemed in control in the first half, taking a 10-point lead at halftime, but it turned the ball over twice in the third quarter, leading to 10 points for Washington (3-3). After the Colts added a field goal in the fourth quarter, Donovan McNabb led the Redskins on a ponderous 8:36 drive that ended with an 8-yard touchdown pass to Keiland Williams with 2:46 left. The Redskins got the ball back twice after that, but one drive ended on downs and the other in an interception. ¶Andre Johnson caught an 11-yard touchdown pass from Matt Schaub with 28 seconds left to give the Texans an exciting fourth-quarter comeback in a 35-31 win over the visiting Chiefs. Houston (4-2) trailed, 31-21, with about seven minutes left after an 11-yard touchdown run by Thomas Jones. Kansas City (3-2) had a big day on the ground, rushing for 228 yards. Jones had 100 yards, and the former Texas star Jamaal Charles rushed for 93. | Football;New England Patriots;Baltimore Ravens;Branch Deion;Brady Tom |
ny0108586 | [
"sports",
"cycling"
] | 2012/05/27 | Rodriguez Nears Giro d’Italia Victory | Thomas De Gendt won the grueling 20th stage of the Giro d’Italia, reigniting his chances for a podium finish. Joaquin Rodriguez retained the overall lead, by 31 seconds over Ryder Hesjedal. With a superb climb of the Passo dello Stelvio, De Gendt finished the so-called queen stage of the Giro in 6 hours 54 minutes 41 seconds. The stage was the toughest of this year’s race, with a 136-mile trek from Caldes culminating in a 14-mile ascent up the snow-covered Stelvio, which has a maximum gradient of 12 percent. The Giro finishes on Sunday in Milan after a 19-mile individual time trial. | Giro d'Italia (Bicycle Race);Rodriguez Joaquin;Milan (Italy);Bicycles and Bicycling;De Gendt Thomas |
ny0125731 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2012/08/07 | The True Threat to Integration in Germany | BERLIN — Over the past several months, the German lawmaker Sebastian Edathy has been poring over hundreds of police and intelligence documents. As chairman of a special parliamentary investigations committee, Mr. Edathy is trying to unravel a series of killings of small-business people of Turkish origin that has rocked the German security and intelligence services and shocked the public. Furthermore, the killings have led to a deep crisis of trust between the large Turkish community — as well as other immigrants — and the police to such an extent that efforts at greater integration could be seriously undermined. “There is no doubt that it is going to take some time to rebuild that trust,” Mr. Edathy said. The killing of eight people of Turkish descent, a Greek man and one female police officer took place between September 2000 and April 2007. The police and intelligence services had failed to connect the cases and find any suspects, until last November. Finally, after a botched bank robbery in the southeastern city of Eisenach, they identified as the main suspects three neo-Nazis who had been living underground since 1999. One of them, Uwe Mundlos, shot and killed his accomplice, Uwe Böhnhardt, and then himself. The third, Beate Zschäpe, went on the run but later gave herself up to the police. The three had belonged to the radical organization the National Socialist Underground. They were known as the Zwickau cell, named for the eastern city where they lived. As the work of the investigations committee continues, members say they have discovered stunning incompetence, a failure to exchange information among the police and the criminal-investigation authorities, and a reluctance by senior intelligence officers to hand over relevant files. Nowhere has the shock been felt more keenly than in the 3.5-million-strong Turkish community, whose members feel betrayed by the institutions of their host country. “The police did not pursue the cases because they have this idea that when it comes to Germans with a foreign background, the reasons for the killings are linked, for instance, to criminal gangs,” said Kenan Kolat, chairman of the Turkish Community in Germany . He believes there is institutionalized racism among the police forces. “The police have this prejudice that if a German of Russian descent is killed it’s because of a drugs dispute, or if a Turk is killed its because of some inner-cultural or family honor dispute,” Mr. Kolat said. “What does that mean for integration when people who become German citizens expect the state to protect them but then they discover that it doesn’t?” Police officials have denied that there is systemic racism among their ranks. Still, the investigations committee is trying to discover how the police failed to connect the dots between the neo-Nazi group and the killings. The Zwickau cell and other groups had, after all, been under constant observation by the intelligence services. “This certainly was a failure for what the domestic intelligence service and all the other security service are accountable for,” Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said recently. The police, too, had recruited informers but somehow failed to discover that the N.S.U. cells had weapons and that the three neo-Nazis from the Zwickau cell had been planning the killings for some time. An even more disturbing aspect is that on Nov. 12, 2011, a day after it became public that the N.S.U. was suspected in the killing of the Turks, the Greek and the policewoman, the office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, destroyed files relating to the case. Those files included details about recruiting far-right informants. Interior Ministry officials said the files had already been due to be shredded as a matter of data-protection policy. Still, even committee members say it seems more than a coincidence that those files should be destroyed just at the investigations began. “Informants do not have clean information,” said Petra Pau, who is also on the parliamentary committee. “That recruitment system should be scrapped.” That is of little solace to the families of the victims. They are demanding a complete overhaul of the police and intelligence services. Mr. Friedrich has already dismissed Heinz Fromm, chief of the domestic intelligence service, and other top officials have been forced to resign. Mr. Edathy, however, says the changes have to go much deeper. He wants an overhaul of the way information is exchanged between the police and the criminal-investigation authorities on the state and national level. And he wants a more professional police force. “That’s all very well,” said Mr. Kolat, the Turkish community leader. But what he wants most of all is for the police to acknowledge the existence of racism among its ranks and do something about it. “If the police remain in self-denial, this racism will not end,” he said. “Germany’s immigrant communities will not feel safe here. What does that say for integration?” Judy Dempsey is editor in chief, Strategic Europe for Carnegie Europe. ( www.carnegieeurope.eu ) | Germany;Turkey;Targeted Killings;Neo Nazi Groups |
ny0249508 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2011/02/03 | Details of Mayor’s Proposed Changes to Pension | Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proposed sweeping changes on Wednesday to the pension system for New York City’s municipal work force, including raising the retirement age for new employees and eliminating a bonus for retired police officers and firefighters. The city’s proposed “New Tier” legislation would make the following changes to the pension-benefit structure for employees of the city and other covered public employers, according to the mayor’s press office. CIVILIANS AND TEACHERS Retirement Age/Vesting · New Tier: Newly hired civilians and teachers will vest after 10 years of city employment and will be eligible to receive pension checks at age 65. · Current: Most employees can vest after five years. Retirement ages vary, but are generally age 57 for civilians and as low as 55 for teachers with 27 years’ experience. Employee Contributions · New Tier: Civilian employees and teachers will contribute 5 percent of their salary in all years of employment. · Current: Civilians contribute 4.85 percent for the first 10 years, dropping to 1.85 percent for the next 20 years. Teachers contribute 4.85 percent for the first 27 years, dropping to 1.85 percent thereafter. Final Salary Calculation · New Tier: Overtime does not count toward final salary calculation. · Current: Overtime does count toward final salary calculation. Teachers Tax-Deferred Annuity · New Tier: Elimination of fixed-return option for Teachers’ Tax-Deferred Annuity (will be fixed at 0 percent going forward, immediately, for all participating members). · Current: 7 percent guaranteed rate of return. UNIFORMED WORKERS New uniformed employees of the Correction and Sanitation Departments, along with new members of the Police and Fire Departments, will be covered by the “Tier 3” plan currently applicable to new police and fire employees, with some modifications. For years, new police and fire employees were allowed to go into the older “Tier 2,” a more expensive plan because of an annual extender bill that passed every year in Albany. In June 2009, Gov. David A. Paterson vetoed the bill, which caused new police and fire employees to fall into the less expensive Tier 3. The mayor applauded the governor’s action. This proposal would cement the governor’s action by creating a “uniform” pension benefit for all of the uniformed services, and includes some changes to the existing Tier 3 for police and fire. Police/Fire Retirement Age/Vesting · New Tier: Vest after 10 years and will be eligible to receive pension checks at age 65. · Tier 3: Vest after five years, eligible to receive pension checks after 20 years of service with no minimum age. · Tier 2: Vest after five years, eligible to receive pension checks after 20 years of service with no minimum age. Full Pension · New Tier: Full pension benefits after 25 years. · Tier 3: Full pension benefits after 25 years. · Tier 2: Full pension at 20 years. Employee Contributions · New Tier: 3 percent contribution for the first 25 years. · Tier 3: Same. · Tier 2: Varies between 0 percent and 3 percent, depending on employee age. Variable Supplemental Fund · New: Eliminates V.S.F. payments for current and future retirees. · Current: After 20 years of service, $12,000 annual V.S.F. payment to nondisability retirees. Final Average Salary Calculation · New Tier: Average of final 3 years’ salary. · Tier 3: Average of final 3 years’ salary. · Tier 2: Final year of salary only. Overtime · New Tier: Overtime does not count toward final salary calculation. · Tier 3: Overtime does count toward final salary calculation, with some limitations. · Tier 2: Overtime does count toward final salary calculation. Disability · New Tier: No disability presumptions, 44 percent of final average salary. · Tier 3: No disability presumptions, 44 percent of final average salary. · Tier 2: disability presumptions in place, 75 percent of last year’s salary. Sanitation (the new tier exactly matches police/fire new tier) Retirement Age/Vesting · New Tier: Vest after 10 years and will be eligible to receive pension checks at age 65. · Current : Vest after five years, eligible to receive pension checks after 20 years of service with no minimum age. Employee Contributions · New Tier: 3 percent contribution for the first 25 years. · Current: 8.35 percent for the first 10 years, then 5.35 percent for the next 10 years, then zero. Full Pension · New Tier: Full pension benefits after 25 years. · Current: Full pension at 20 years. Overtime · New Tier: Overtime does not count toward final salary calculation. · Current: Overtime does count toward final salary calculation, with some limitations. Disability · New Tier: No disability presumptions, 44 percent of final average salary. · Current: Disability presumptions in place, 75 percent of salary. Correction (the new tier exactly matches police/fire new tier) Retirement Age/Vesting · New Tier: Vest after 10 years and will be eligible to receive pension checks at age 65. · Current : Vest after five years, eligible to receive pension checks after 20 years of service with no minimum age. Employee Contributions · New Tier: 3 percent contribution for the first 25 years. · Current: 7.61 percent for the first 10 years, then 4.61 percent for the next 10 years, then zero. Full Pension · New Tier: Full pension benefits after 25 years. · Current: Full pension at 20 years. Overtime · New Tier: Overtime does not count toward final salary calculation. · Current: Overtime does count toward final salary calculation, with some limitations. Disability · New Tier: No disability presumptions, 44 percent of final average salary. · Current: Disability presumptions in place, 75 percent of salary. Variable Supplemental Fund · New: Eliminates V.S.F. payments for current and future retirees. · Current: Starting in 2019, current and future officers with 20 years of service would have received a guaranteed $12,000 annual V.S.F. payment. | Pensions and Retirement Plans;New York City;Bloomberg Michael R |
ny0175505 | [
"business",
"worldbusiness"
] | 2007/10/12 | 2 Are Ousted at UBS | LONDON, Oct. 11 (Reuters) — The Swiss banking giant UBS , where market turmoil this summer led to $3.4 billion of credit losses, pushed out two fixed-income executives yesterday. David Martin, global head of interest rate products, is leaving after a 16-year career at the bank, according to an internal memo from the bank’s newly appointed global fixed-income head, André Esteves. James G. Stehli, who ran the collateralized debt obligation unit, also left. C.D.O.’s are securities composed of other bonds; they have been hit hard by their exposure to risky mortgages. A UBS spokeswoman, Rohini Pragasam, confirmed the memo but declined to comment further. | UBS AG;Appointments and Executive Changes;Stocks and Bonds |
ny0032557 | [
"us"
] | 2013/12/20 | A Legacy in the Balance on Surveillance Policies | WASHINGTON — For President Obama, the proposed overhaul of the American surveillance state confronts him with a fundamental choice: Will he become the commander in chief many expected in 2008 or remain the one he became in 2009? Or is there a balance in between? At the heart of the report by a White House advisory group is a challenge to Mr. Obama’s conception of his presidency. A candidate who promised to reverse what he saw as excesses in the war against terrorists wound up preserving and even amplifying many of the policies he inherited. With his last election behind him, he is being challenged to decide if that is still the right approach. “Whether he implements these recommendations will go a long way toward determining the legacy of his presidency,” said Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “My own sense is the president is deeply conflicted about where’s the right place to end up. He’s still at his core a constitutional lawyer who understands the importance of these issues, but the realpolitik of the office set in rather quickly.” Developed in response to the revelations by a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, the report urged the president to ratchet back the expansive intelligence apparatus that evolved under President George W. Bush and continued to grow under Mr. Obama. In effect, the 46 recommendations would constrain some of the autonomy the N.S.A. has come to enjoy and force greater attention to privacy and civil liberties concerns. But Mr. Obama must decide whether such a recalibration would unreasonably increase the risk of terrorists slipping through the surveillance net. For all of his campaign speeches, that was a risk he was not willing to take once in office. Yet in recent months, he has discussed eventually ending the war on terrorism. The report in some ways captures Mr. Obama’s internal conflicts. After Mr. Snowden began leaking information about secret programs, Mr. Obama initially seemed surprised that the public did not trust him to use them appropriately. Over the weeks and months that followed, according to both public statements and advisers who have spoken with him privately, he seemed to pivot more toward the notion that greater trust had to be built into the system. The report, which he plans to take with him when he leaves Friday for vacation in Hawaii, represents “kind of who he would be if he were not in the position he was in,” one adviser said. “My sense is that on the one hand, the president’s own personal instincts are reasonably civil libertarian in general and that in his heart of hearts he resonates with the call for more aggressive protection of privacy and individual liberty,” said the adviser, who requested anonymity to discuss Mr. Obama’s thinking. “On the other hand, my sense is that like every president, when he finds himself ultimately responsible for the safety of the nation, the stakes get raised in ways one can barely imagine.” How much Mr. Obama embraces the report seems uncertain. He has already rejected a recommendation to separate the leadership of the N.S.A. and the United States Cyber Command. But after appointing the group and making its report public, Mr. Obama will be hard pressed not to adopt some of it. “How does a president say, ‘I disagree with my review group’?” asked Michael Allen, a former Bush aide and author of “Blinking Red,” a new book on the creation of the intelligence architecture after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “It needs to be seen at the very least as, ‘I’m largely or in some nonsymbolic way taking most of what they’re offering.’ ” Mr. Allen, now managing director of Beacon Global Strategies, said such pressure may cause Mr. Obama to go too far and open the country up to more danger. “I fear they will say something like, ‘We need to make a major course correction,’ ” he said. Mr. Obama came into office having run against Mr. Bush’s first term but inheriting his second. Before leaving office, Mr. Bush had already moderated his counterterrorism program in hopes that it would survive his presidency. He stopped waterboarding, emptied secret C.I.A. prisons, transferred many prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and secured bipartisan legislation on detention, interrogation and surveillance. When he took over, Mr. Obama made further adjustments but kept much of the program intact and, when it came to drone strikes, even expanded it. His thinking was further shaped during his first presidential Christmas in Hawaii, when an extremist tried to take down an airliner with explosives in his underwear. “I think Obama in some ways is more authoritarian than Bush on these privacy issues,” said Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican critic who said disclosures about N.S.A. programs were far more alarming than he had ever anticipated. White House officials reject such characterizations, but the momentum to revamp N.S.A. rules comes at a time when Mr. Obama also faces other decisions on how much to shift course. Allies are pressing him to support the release of a comprehensive Senate report on the history of interrogations and torture. The president is also left to decide how much to scale back drone strikes as he signaled he planned to do in a speech this year. Adm. Dennis C. Blair, Mr. Obama’s first director of national intelligence, said the president should take a deeper look at national security policies beyond simply surveillance. “Appointing this commission on one small aspect of an important issue for American democracy is a typical small-ball play by this administration,” he said. “When the administration asks for a debate, it doesn’t really want it. What we need is a debate about what level of security we want traded off against what level of privacy we want to maintain.” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said Mr. Obama has been too passive in explaining his rationale to the public. “Most presidents would have now given a speech and said, ‘O.K., here’s what the recommendations are; here’s what I think we ought to do,’ ” Mr. McCain said. “Instead, it just came out. There’s not a translation of facts and events to remedies that the president supports.” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said that Mr. Obama will do that in January after digesting the report. The review, Mr. Carney said, “reflects a view here that we can and should make changes that are consistent with our need to maintain security for the United States and the American people and our allies, to combat the threats that exist, but that allow for us to provide more assurance to the American people that there are safeguards against abuse and that there is oversight in place.” Where he will fall along that spectrum will be decided on the beaches of Oahu. | Barack Obama;Government Surveillance;US Politics;US Military;NSA;Edward Snowden;Pentagon;Terrorism;Spying and Intelligence Agencies |
ny0241922 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2011/03/11 | In Kruger Case, Real Estate Developer Among the Cast | A corruption case unsealed on Thursday included a large cast of characters beyond State Senator Carl Kruger , Assemblyman William F. Boyland Jr. and six others who were charged. Also highlighted in the criminal complaint was “a significant real estate development firm,” identified as “Real Estate Developer No. 1,” that was “spearheading an over $4 billion, multiyear, mixed-use commercial and residential development project in Brooklyn.” The description left little doubt that the firm was Forest City Ratner, the developer behind the Atlantic Yards project, a 22-acre residential and retail complex in Brooklyn that includes a new home for the Nets. It was the second time in less than two years that the company played a role in a corruption case, though it was not charged either time. The complaint accused Mr. Kruger, a Brooklyn Democrat, of taking at least $1 million in bribes in exchange for help on state matters, including bribes from Richard Lipsky, a lobbyist for Forest City Ratner, and other clients. The complaint said the company’s “vice president of governmental affairs and public relations” — Bruce R. Bender has that role at Forest City Ratner — had asked Mr. Kruger last December for state money for three projects: $9 million for the Carlton Avenue Bridge, which is to be replaced as part of the Atlantic Yards project; $2 million for a retail development in the Mill Basin neighborhood of Brooklyn; and $4 million for the renovation of the skating rink in Prospect Park, a public project. Mr. Bender’s wife, Amy Bender, is on the board of the Prospect Park Alliance , the park’s fund-raising group. Mr. Kruger’s chief of staff told Mr. Bender that only $4 million was available, the complaint said: Mr. Kruger, whose phone had been tapped, called Mr. Bender and told him “that he had to choose what project he wanted to get done.” Mr. Kruger made it clear that the bridge was “out.” Mr. Bender said that was “bad.” Mr. Kruger again asked what Mr. Bender wanted done, the complaint said, then appeared to answer the question himself. “I guess the park,” he said. He ruled out the shopping center, and as for the bridge, he referred to it with an obscenity. In another call, Mr. Kruger told Mr. Bender that another $500,000 was available for the skating rink. “The vice president laughed and said, ‘You’re cute. You’re good. You’re good, Carl, you are a good friend,’ ” the complaint said. Forest City Ratner did not deny that Mr. Bender was the person to whom Mr. Kruger was speaking. “I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anyone that the person in charge of government relations at Forest City Ratner speaks to government officials,” said Joe DePlasco, a spokesman. The complaint, he said, “does not suggest that Forest City Ratner behaved in any way that’s inappropriate.” Mr. Bender lives in Brooklyn, Mr. DePlasco said, “and I assume he likes Prospect Park.” Mr. DePlasco said the company ended its relationship with Mr. Lipsky on Wednesday, when word of the case began to leak out, because of the “serious nature of the charges.” Forest City Ratner was the development partner of The New York Times Company on its Midtown headquarters. Although the complaint contained no evidence that Mr. Bender believed Mr. Kruger was taking bribes, longtime opponents of Atlantic Yards were dismayed that no one from the company had been charged. “I find it sad that politicians are expendable, but rich developers are not,” said Candace Carponter, the legal director of the group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn . She said the case echoed one in Yonkers: Sandy Annabi, a member of the City Council, had long opposed a Forest City Ratner project there — until she abruptly changed course. In January 2010, she was indicted on charges of dropping her opposition to that and another project in return for almost $167,000 in cash and gifts from Zehy Jereis, the former chairman of the Yonkers Republican Party. A trial for Ms. Annabi and Mr. Jereis, who was also indicted, is set for June 20. | Forest City Ratner Companies;Bribery and Kickbacks;Kruger Carl;Brooklyn (NYC) |
ny0247888 | [
"science"
] | 2011/05/10 | Bones Indicate Tasmanian Tiger, Now Extinct, Ambushed Its Prey | It was known as the Tasmanian tiger, for its striped coat, or the Tasmanian wolf, for its doglike appearance. But new research indicates the bone structure and hunting habits of Thylacinus cynocephalus may make the “tiger” designation more apt. Although the now-extinct marsupial was kept in zoos until the 1930s, little is known about its life in the wild. But the shape of its elbows offers some clues to its behavior and calls into question a commonly accepted reason for its extinction, researchers report in the journal Biology Letters. The authors classified 32 species of mammals into three groups: ambush predators, like tigers; pounce/pursuit predators, like foxes, which engage in a short chase; and pursuit predators, like wolves, which follow their quarry for long distances and may cooperate to bring down larger animals. They found that the groups can be characterized by elbow joints — more flexible for animals that hunt with little running, and more rigid for the distance runners. The thylacine, with its twistable elbow, was more of an ambusher. Though its nonretractable claws suggest that it did not grapple with its prey, it almost certainly did not run after it like a wolf. Christine M. Janis, a professor of biology at Brown University and an author of the study, said the finding made the story of the Tasmanian tiger’s extinction in Australia more complicated. “People have assumed that the immigration of the doglike dingo was the reason for the extinction,” she said. “But the thylacine had a different hunting style from the dingo, and so it was not likely an issue of simple competitive replacement.” | Endangered and Extinct Species;Australia;Science and Technology |
ny0228522 | [
"business",
"media"
] | 2010/07/26 | Promoting Literacy the Curious George Way | The Library of Congress has chosen Curious George, the children’s book character, to star in its new public service advertising campaign. Introduced Monday and distributed by the Advertising Council, the ads are intended to encourage parents to read with their children. According to Florida State University, this activity makes children more willing to read and increases the frequency of their reading. Universal Partnerships and Licensing, a division of NBC Universal that owns rights to the Curious George character for all products except books, created ads for television as well as for print, outdoor and online media. All advertising features the iconic monkey — whose story, by Margret and H. A. Rey, was first published in 1941 by Houghton Mifflin, now the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, which still owns the series’ book publishing rights — and his best friend and mentor, “the man with the yellow hat.” In one print ad, George and the man sit on the floor; the man looks over George’s shoulder while George pores over a pile of books. Copy says, “What makes a curious reader? You do,” and suggests, “Read to your child today and inspire a lifelong love of reading.” An outdoor ad features George sitting on the man’s lap, in a big armchair, sharing a book; the former has removed his hat and slung it on the chair’s back. Copy says, “Share curiosity. Read together.” In the TV spot, the man shows George a periscope he has found, while the narrator says, “Every child is curious. Turn their curiosity into a lifelong love of learning. It’s one of the most important gifts you can share...Share a book together, today.” All ads direct audiences to , a Library of Congress Web site that invites “people of all ages to discover the fascinating people, places and events that await you whenever you read.” As part of the Curious George campaign, the site offers advice to parents on choosing books to read aloud to children and on the best ways to do this reading. The new campaign is the latest joint effort by the Library of Congress and the Ad Council to promote literacy; the two began collaborating in 2000. Their first campaign encouraged children and adults to learn about United States history, while more recent campaigns used fictional characters from the films, “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and “Disney’s ‘A Christmas Carol,’ ” to promote literacy in all forms — like reading a book or visiting a museum — among children in the fourth through sixth grades. The Curious George campaign is geared to parents of even younger children, ages 3 to 7, and is being introduced now to coincide with the children’s summer vacations. According to a study conducted by the Center for Evaluation, American Academy of Arts and Sciences , reading four or five books during the summer can prevent reading achievement losses among elementary school students that might normally occur then. Dr. James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, said the new campaign was a first for the library, which he said had never promoted inter-generational reading before. “When there is an overall increase in parental involvement, children become engaged when they see a role model in their parent,” he said. He also said he had read “Curious George” to his four children and 13 grandchildren, and found “it is one of the most effective stories, the idea of a little character who’s curious.” Kathy Crosby, senior vice president and group campaign director for the Ad Council, said the new campaign ”helps parents understand that every child is curious, and that parents have the ability to turn that curiosity into a lifelong love of reading and learning. The main message is, ‘Share a book together, it’s the most important gift you can give to children.’ ” “Our hope is that reading will become part of parents’ everyday routine, something they and their children can look forward to. Parents are so busy, strapped for time now that a lot of things fall by the wayside. But reading has such an amazing impact on children’s future ability to learn,” she added. Universal Partnerships and Licensing and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing have donated the use of the Curious George characters for the campaign. Stephanie Sperber, president of Universal Partnerships and Licensing, said she expected the new campaign would provide “great, high-visibility locations, places where we’re not with Curious George. We’re not outdoors. To see the character in these places reading really will connect with parents, will resonate with parents. “Getting George in the public eye, reminding people why he’s compelling, lovable and relevant is always good for us,” she added. The Curious George empire now includes the Reys’ eight original stories in hardcover, paperback, CD, Spanish and bilingual editions; newer books; a PBS children’s television series; two films; toys; clothing; and music. | Books and Literature;Children and Youth;Advertising and Marketing |
ny0195376 | [
"sports",
"ncaafootball"
] | 2009/11/22 | Yale Fails on Fourth-Down Risk, Then Harvard Pulls Out Win | WEST HAVEN, Conn. — During his first year at Yale, Coach Tom Williams kept telling his football team that he would be aggressive. The Bulldogs ran two fake-punt plays earlier this season, and both worked. But this time, Yale was playing Harvard, its nemesis, in the 126th edition of their annual matchup known as The Game. Paul Rice, a senior linebacker who is the Yale captain, relayed the fake punt call in the huddle Saturday on fourth-and-22 at the Bulldogs’ 25-yard line with two and a half minutes to play. Rice said he had no doubt it would succeed. But this time, John Powers rushed for only 15 yards. Three plays later, Harvard quarterback Collier Winters threw a 32-yard touchdown pass to Chris Lorditch with 1 minute 32 seconds left to give the Crimson its first lead in its 14-10 victory. In the final minute, Harvard linebacker Jon Takamura intercepted a pass by Yale quarterback Patrick Witt to seal the season-ending triumph for Harvard (7-3, 6-1 Ivy League). The Crimson has won three straight against Yale (4-6, 2-5), and eight of their last nine meetings for the first time since 1922. Yale has a 65-53-8 lead in the series, which dates to 1875. “We’re playing to win the football game,” Williams said afterward. “We thought it was worth 22 yards, and we came up 5 yards short. Our whole idea was to keep our foot on the pedal and not play scared.” Williams was crestfallen, a stark contrast to the Harvard players, who were mobbed by their fans among the Yale Bowl crowd of 52,692. They later put on bright pink leis, courtesy of Takamura, a native of Honolulu. The Yale senior Larry Abare, a ferocious safety, played with a cast that covered almost his entire right arm, including his hand. He broke the arm Oct. 17 in a 7-0 victory against Lehigh. Yale lost three of its next four games, and Abare received medical clearance on Monday to play against Harvard. “It’s something I definitely was going to do,” Abare said. But Williams became the focal point. Harvard scored on its previous possession, when Winters hit Matt Luft for a 41-yard touchdown with 6:46 left. The Crimson used its final timeout during Yale’s ensuing possession. Yale led, 10-7, and Williams did not want to give the ball back to Harvard. So Yale ran a variation on a fake-punt play the Crimson had never seen. It included a lateral from Rice to Powers, but defensive back Anthony Spadafino dragged Powers down at the Yale 40 with less than three minutes remaining. “You’re a genius if that play works,” Harvard Coach Tim Murphy said. “If you don’t, you know the deal.” Yale punter Tom Mante averaged 51.3 yards on three punts Saturday, including a soaring 69-yard kick that wowed the Bulldogs’ fans. And the Yale defense stuffed the Crimson on a goal-line stand midway through the third quarter. But Harvard seemed to get on track after a slow start. Two plays before Luft scored Harvard’s first touchdown, running back Gino Gordon broke a tackle at the line of scrimmage on fourth-and-4 and rambled for 19 yards. “We were moving the ball,” Winters said, “and eventually, we thought we’d get it across the goal line.” Although Luft said he ran the wrong route, he made an alteration to find open space in the middle of the field and gathered in the touchdown pass from Winters. The 6-foot-4 Lorditch later beat defensive back Adam Money for the winning score. “We were fortunate today,” said Murphy, whose team lost a chance to tie for the Ivy League title when Penn (8-2, 7-0) beat Cornell in its season finale, 34-0. “But you do get a little bit more fortunate if you play hard all the time.” Murphy said his team was outplayed and outcoached by Yale in the first half, when the Bulldogs took a 10-0 lead. Williams ended up as the coach who had to defend his decision-making, not unlike New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick last week. The Patriots failed to convert on fourth-and-2 with a 6-point lead and a little more than two minutes remaining, and they lost to Indianapolis. Williams addressed the fake-punt play before anyone even asked. “I was trying to keep momentum on the blue side,” he said with a weak smile. | Football;College Athletics;Harvard University;Yale University;Williams Tom |
ny0222705 | [
"sports"
] | 2010/11/11 | Olympic Hopefuls Say Doping Rule Amounts to Double Jeopardy | On paper, the swimmer Jessica Hardy appears to be a lock to compete in the 2012 London Olympics. She broke the world record in the 100-meter breaststroke last year and has swum fast enough to qualify for four events at the United States Olympic trials. But making the Olympic team is not her only goal. A positive drug test weeks before the 2008 Beijing Games cost her the experience of competing there . After serving a yearlong doping suspension, she is looking to clear her name. A binding sports arbitration panel reduced the standard two-year doping suspension in Hardy’s case after she argued that she had ingested the banned weight-loss and muscle-building drug clenbuterol by accident. It was discovered in an over-the-counter nutritional supplement she was taking. But Hardy’s road to the London Games remains a treacherous path of red tape and unknowns because of a relatively new and confusing International Olympic Committee rule. The rule, instituted just before the 2008 Games, bars from the next Olympics any athlete who has served a doping suspension of six months or longer. While Olympic officials say that eligibility restriction is necessary to rid the Games of athletes who dope, critics say it constitutes a second punishment for those who have served suspensions. No database of athletes barred for doping exists, so it is unclear how many London hopefuls may be affected. The bigger problem for Hardy and other Americans facing the ban is that the I.O.C. will not hear their appeals unless they have made the United States Olympic team. Conflicting rules by individual sports federations, the United States Olympic Committee and the I.O.C. create a vicious circle. In many sports that select teams through trials, like swimming and track, athletes deemed ineligible for the Olympics may not be allowed to vie for a spot at the trials in the first place. “It’s just a bunch of dead ends that’s turned into a disaster,” the 23-year-old Hardy said. “For the sake of myself and for my U.S.A. teammates, I’m hoping that they’ll make a ruling before 2012. If not, I will not let it go because it’s not fair. I will not go down without a fight. It will be a huge distraction, but it’s not my fault.” The I.O.C. adopted the rule to save the Olympic community the public-relations nightmare of having known cheaters in competition, said Arne Ljungqvist, the chairman of the I.O.C.’s medical commission. Some national federations were shortening athletes’ suspensions so they could compete in the Olympics, he said, which the I.O.C. considered wrong. The rule serves as an additional deterrent to doping, Ljungqvist said, because drug testing alone has often not been enough to catch those who cheat. Antidoping officials said that no athletes bound for the 2010 Vancouver Games contested the rule, which was instituted three days before Hardy’s failed drug test in July 2008. So the lead-up to the London Games is the first time athletes are expected to challenge or appeal it. A wave of appeals — particularly by Americans — will most likely be heard by the Court of Arbitration for Sport before the Olympics. That court’s ruling would be final. Ljungqvist said the United States is one of the few countries that select their Olympic team through trials, which often occur close to the deadline for submitting a final roster of athletes to the I.O.C. “There is an appeal process in place, and any athlete has the right to go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport or do whatever once they are named to their Olympic team,” he said. “The timing problem is a very U.S.-specific case, and international sports rules are not at all adjusted to what may be the selection of teams in various countries.” Hardy and at least one other American, the runner LaShawn Merritt, have asked the I.O.C. to rule on their eligibility for the Olympics, but the I.O.C. has declined to do so. Merritt, the 2008 Olympic gold medalist in the 400 meters, tested positive in 2009 for a prohibited substance found in the male-enhancement product ExtenZe — which, according to its label, contained DHEA, a banned steroid. He received a 21-month suspension that will end next July. An American arbitration panel that decided Merritt’s case found that the I.O.C. rule violated the World Anti-Doping Code, to which the I.O.C. adheres. It said a fair and just system would allow athletes to appeal the rule immediately and warned that the uncertainty of the rule could cause the U.S.O.C. “to face unnecessary and excessive litigation, with its resulting costs.” David Howman , director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said last month that the Olympic ban was an eligibility issue, not a doping sanction — a position the Merritt panel called skullduggery. Athletes and the I.O.C. would be responsible for resolving any conflicts, he said. Howard Jacobs, the lawyer for Merritt and Hardy, said the timing of those resolutions could pose a headache for both sides. “There might be 15, 20, 30 cases before the Olympics that end up challenging that rule,” Jacobs said before explaining that the law could be challenged in Switzerland, where the I.O.C. is based. “It’s a very complicated case dealing with a lot of Swiss law, as to whether the rule itself is valid under Swiss law. If someone decides the rule is not valid, then that’s the end of it. If not, then they’ll have to see whether the application of that rule to that athlete is fair or not.” The arbitrators in Merritt’s case wrote that the U.S.O.C. and its member organizations could not use the I.O.C. rule to bar an athlete from competing in the Olympic trials. But Scott Blackmun , chief executive of the U.S.O.C., said his organization was waiting for the national sports federations to draft their eligibility rules for the trials. The U.S.O.C. approves those rules, basically giving it the final say on whether athletes affected by the I.O.C. ban can compete. “We’re between a rock and a hard place,” Blackmun said. If any athletes affected by the ban make the Olympic team, the U.S.O.C. stands to lose if they are denied entry to the Games. At that point, it might be too late for the U.S.O.C. to replace those athletes with ones who just missed qualifying at trials. “This is a new rule, and I think what we are seeing is that the rule might have some unintended consequences,” said Blackmun, who said he supports the spirit of the ban. The British Olympic Association has had a similar but stricter policy than the I.O.C.’s in place since 1992. It bars for life any athlete who has been sanctioned for “a serious” doping offense. The difference between the British and I.O.C. rules, though, is that British athletes can appeal their sanctions immediately. Miriam Wilkens, a spokeswoman for the British Olympic Association, said 32 athletes had appealed since 1996, with 29 succeeding. Those athletes had to prove one of three points: that their doping offenses were minor; that they had no fault or no significant fault of negligence; or that significant mitigating circumstances were involved. It is likely that Merritt and Hardy will have to prove at least one of those points. For now, Hardy’s strategy is to try to remain positive, though that, too, has been difficult. Soon after her failed test, and weeks before the banned drug was discovered in her supplement, even her parents doubted her. “They said, ‘Are you lying to us?’ ” Hardy said, choking up. “That’s when we hit rock bottom.” When a friend told her about the I.O.C.’s Olympic ban, Hardy broke into tears. “I fully support the I.O.C. rule with the intention to keep dirty athletes from getting to the Olympics,” she said. “But I think that the rule is sloppily put together and not organized right. It needs to be completely reworded to be more fair to the athletes.” Hardy said that her unused 2008 Olympic team uniform remained in storage. If she made the team in 2012 and was unable to compete, she said, “I don’t know how I could handle that.” | Olympic Games (2008);Doping (Sports);Steroids;Hardy Jessica |
ny0064261 | [
"sports",
"hockey"
] | 2014/06/05 | The Rangers’ Adventures in the Stanley Cup Finals | When the Rangers meet the Los Angeles Kings in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals on Wednesday night it will mark the 11th time in the club’s long, and often unsuccessful, history that it has made it to the championship round. The cartoonist Bob Eckstein looks back on the Rangers’ first 10 trips to the finals, beginning with the 1928 showdown with the now-departed Montreal Maroons. The Rangers won that matchup but then only three of the nine that followed. Actually, they have not even been in the finals since 1994, when they beat the Vancouver Canucks in seven games and Mark Messier got to happily hold up the Cup in front of 20,000 delirious fans at Madison Square Garden. Which happens to be the subject of one of Eckstein’s cartoons. | Ice hockey;Stanley Cup;Rangers |
ny0274172 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2016/02/04 | Pussy Riot Video Mocks Russian Prosecutor Accused of Corruption | MOSCOW — Wearing police uniforms and fishnet stockings, they whip hooded prisoners and waterboard them in their prison cells. The well-made-up women gleefully throw wads of cash into the air and flirt viciously with their viewers. The Russian punk protest group Pussy Riot sashayed back into the public eye on Wednesday with the release of a music video savaging the country’s prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika, who locked up three members of the group in 2012. It is a black satire of the Russian criminal justice system, in which the women, playing prison guards, rap lustily about money and torture a man with hot clothes irons. The video for "Chaika," a new performance by the Russian punk protest group Pussy Riot. Credit Credit Video by PussyRiotVideo “I run the war on corruption here, or to be precise, I run the corruption,” the group’s leader, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, sings alluding to accusations of high-level wrongdoing in Mr. Chaika’s office. Those accusations were brought by Aleksei A. Navalny, the anticorruption activist, late last year . Mr. Navalny suggested that Mr. Chaika’s son jointly owned a luxury hotel in Greece and villas in Switzerland with Olga Lopatina, the wife of a deputy prosecutor general. Ms. Lopatina’s previous husband had ties to a notorious organized crime group in southern Russia, the Tsapok gang. Ms. Lopatina has denied the ties and sued Mr. Navalny. Mr. Chaika denied wrongdoing. The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said he would not comment on allegations concerning the grown son of a federal official. Ms. Tolokonnikova was one of three members of the protest group who were convicted in 2012 for performing a protest concert in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Ms. Tolokonnikova and her bandmate Maria Alyokhina served a year and nine months in prison before they were released under an amnesty law before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Another member of the group, Yekaterina Samutsevich, had been released on parole . In the video, Ms. Tolokonnikova plays, with a sly smile, Mr. Chaika, her old nemesis. “I love Russia, I am a patriot, but I could live in Switzerland,” she sings. The young women sway to the tinny rhythm, gorge on a lavish feast in a palatial setting and pout at the camera. One wears a bird mask, a reference to Mr. Chaika, whose name means “sea gull.” Ms. Tolokonnikova alternates between flapping her hands like wings and forming pistols with her fingers. A framed portrait of President Vladimir V. Putin, the type that hangs in official offices here, looks down on Ms. Tolokonnikova as she eats a gold-painted loaf of bread. And there are subtle hints at life inside the zone, the Russian penal colony system, such as a checkerboard drawn on a table with spilled sugar. The game pieces are also lumps of sugar. “Be humble, learn to obey, don’t worry about material stuff,” Ms. Tolokonnikova rhymes sarcastically. “And son, if you do worry about material things in life, then be loyal to Putin forever, son,” Ms. Tolokonnikova raps softly. “You want to get away with murder, be loyal to your boss.” | Russia;Pussy Riot;Yuri Y Chaika;Nadezhda Tolokonnikova;Video Recordings; Downloads and Streaming;Music;Corruption;Aleksei Navalny;Vladimir Putin |
ny0002918 | [
"world",
"americas"
] | 2013/03/22 | U.N. to Investigate Chemical Weapons Accusations in Syria | UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations will investigate accusations that chemical weapons were used earlier this week in Aleppo Province in northern Syria, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced on Thursday. Mr. Ban said the investigation would begin “as soon as practically possible,” with various agencies of the world body developing a plan on how to proceed. He called on all sides in Syria’s two-year-old civil war to allow “unfettered” access to the United Nations team. Mr. Ban suggested that the investigation would concentrate solely on a rocket attack on Tuesday that killed 26 people. That attack has become the focus of a propaganda war between supporters of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, and his opponents, who accuse each other of firing a missile laden with chemicals in Khan al-Assal, a key eastern area of Aleppo Province. In a brief statement that he read to reporters, Mr. Ban said he was responding to a formal request made by the Syrian government on Wednesday for a specialized, independent mission to investigate the events in Khan al-Assal. Mr. Ban said he was aware of accusations about a second chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburbs, but gave no indication that they would be included in the investigation. He did not answer questions from reporters. Western nations, including the United States, have said in the Security Council that the Aleppo accusations and the Damascus accusations, made by the opposition, should be scrutinized. However, senior American officials have said there is no confirmed indication that chemical weapons were used. Mr. Ban called the reports of chemical weapons use “disturbing,” and said he had sent two letters to Mr. Assad since the conflict began two years ago, reminding him that any chemical weapons stockpiles his country has should be secured. “I have repeatedly stated that use of chemical weapons by any side under any circumstance would constitute an outrageous crime,” Mr. Ban said, adding that anyone who used them “must be held responsible.” Mr. Ban said the inquiry would investigate the reports about Aleppo and “contribute to the safety and security of chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria.” He said the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the World Health Organization would take the lead in organizing the investigation. Video Amateur video has been pivotal to the way the conflict in Syria is understood. Susan E. Rice, the American envoy to the United Nations, issued a statement saying that the United States welcomed the United Nations investigation, stressing that “any and all credible allegations” should be pursued. The Syrian government should provide unfettered access to “all relevant individuals and locations,” it said. Humanitarian workers should be allowed in to treat the injured, the statement also said. It repeated previous American warnings that there would be “consequences” if the Assad government used or failed to secure chemical weapons. The chemical weapons claims on Wednesday were immediately entangled in the longstanding sharp divisions between Russia, Syria’s most powerful remaining ally, and Western states that oppose the Damascus government. The accusations and demands for an outside investigation ignited a tense discussion in the Security Council about how to respond. The Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Jaafari, told reporters that his government had requested an official inquiry to corroborate its claims that insurgents, not government forces, were behind the attack. Mr. Jaafari said he had delivered a letter to Mr. Ban’s office seeking a “specialized, independent and neutral technical mission” to investigate the use of chemical weapons by the opposition. The opposition has denied possessing or using chemical weapons. In the Security Council debate, France said the United Nations should investigate the opposition’s accusations against the government, in Aleppo Province and in the Damascus suburbs. Russia responded by accusing the West of trying to create a diversion. The Russian envoy, Vitaly I. Churkin, said the United States, France and others were engaged in “delaying tactics.” “Instead of launching those propaganda balloons, it is better to get our focus right,” said Mr. Churkin, adding that the Western demands echoed the demands more than a decade ago for inspections in Iraq, which failed to find any chemical weapons. Mr. Churkin and Mr. Jaafari each suggested that the opposition faked a chemical attack by the government to provoke international intervention. The Syrian ambassador said it would not be surprising for the opposition to try to manufacture a crisis while President Obama was visiting the region. The French envoy, Gerard Araud, sarcastically referring to Mr. Churkin’s summary of the council debate as “fascinating,” said France and its allies wanted the United Nations to investigate all possible incidents. “It is not a question of delay; it is a question of looking at all the allegations which have been tabled,” Mr. Araud said. That position was echoed by Britain and the United States. “The facts are not clear at the moment, and this is the whole point,” said Philip Parham, Britain’s deputy permanent representative. France and Britain sent their own letter to Mr. Ban later Thursday demanding that all chemical weapons accusations emerging from Syria be thoroughly documented, including the latest two and one from Homs in December. The United Nations can claim a mandate to investigate matters beyond those requested by the Syrian government, Security Council diplomats said. | Syria;UN;Biological and Chemical Warfare |
ny0110379 | [
"sports",
"hockey"
] | 2012/05/15 | 2012 Stanley Cup: Kings Keep Rolling Against Coyotes | GLENDALE, Ariz. (AP) — The Phoenix Coyotes survived stretches of playing on their heels in the first two rounds of the playoffs, absorbing what an opponent threw at them before counterpunching. Against the Los Angeles Kings , they quickly learned that method did not always work. The Kings, who are probably more skilled and certainly as tenacious as the Coyotes, were aggressive in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals, rolling to a 4-2 win Sunday night. With Game 2 here on Tuesday night, the Coyotes have a short turnaround to figure out how to beat them. “We know we need to be better,” Coyotes forward Boyd Gordon said Monday after practice. “They’re a very good team, they work hard, they compete and they battle. If we come out like we did in Game 1, we’ll be in big trouble.” Los Angeles, the last team in the conference to lock up a spot in the postseason, has perhaps been the league’s best playoff team so far, employing a combination of grit, skill and superb goaltending to overwhelm opponents. The Kings knocked off No. 1 seed Vancouver in five games, swept second-seeded St. Louis in the second round and dominated Phoenix in the opener. Even with a week off after beating the Blues, Los Angeles showed no sign of rust, attacking from the opening face-off. The Kings outshot the Coyotes, 17-4, in the first period, overcame two miscues by the usually steady goalie Jonathan Quick and did not give the Coyotes a chance to fight back. Dwight King sealed the win with his second goal of the night, into an empty net, sending Los Angeles to its sixth straight road playoff victory — one short of the N.H.L. record for a postseason. “We know how we play and don’t worry about the matchups,” Kings center Jarret Stoll said. “We know all four lines can play, all four centers can play in every situation. When you have that, that’s pretty important to the team.” A team without any true stars, Phoenix relies on a lunch-pail approach, getting to loose pucks first, winning individual battles all over the ice. In Game 1, the Coyotes came out flat and the Kings jumped on them at the start. Derek Morris scored late in the period on a shot from center, but that seemed like more of a fluke. The Coyotes displayed some grit when scoring their second goal — Mikkel Boedker shot from in front after Antoine Vermette won a battle behind the goal — but there were far too few such instances. “We’ve been disappointed in the way we played some other games,” Coyotes Coach Dave Tippett said. “But like I said before, we’ve been able to find a way to kind of scratch and claw our way out of it.” | Hockey Ice;Los Angeles Kings;Phoenix Coyotes;Playoff Games |
ny0197634 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2009/10/25 | At Fairfield Theater, Halloween Shows by Caravan of Thieves | CARAVAN OF Thieves — a Bridgeport-based band made up of Ben Dean, violinist; Brian Anderson, double bassist; and the singing, acoustic guitar-slinging spouses Carrie and James Sangiovanni — doesn’t mind if you leave its live shows wondering whether the band is as sketchy as its name suggests. Its music, a cross of Django Reinhardt-inspired gypsy jazz and slightly twisted lyrics, is deliberately stewed in mystique. “We have a little bit of an interest in the afterlife — spooky things,” said Mr. Sangiovanni, nicknamed Fuzz for his unruly hair. “And that’s worked its way into some of our songs.” Take the lyrics from “The Butcher’s Wife,” off the Thieves’ recent self-released debut album, “Bouquet”: “If you care not to meet the afterlife/Then don’t get friendly with the butcher’s wife.” The Thieves, who will play two Halloween -themed shows on Friday and Saturday at the Fairfield Theater Company, formed in early 2008. Mr. and Mrs. Sangiovanni had been playing together in the alternative rock band Rolla, and found that audiences were responding favorably to them as an acoustic duo. “We could just feel people were connecting with us. And we felt more comfortable in that setting,” said Mr. Sangiovanni, who, at 39, is the senior Thief (Ms. Sangiovanni is 28; Mr. Dean, of New Haven, is 24; and Mr. Anderson, of Bridgeport, is 31). When the Sangiovannis added the other two, they were able to broaden and texturize their music; their live shows have since been winning praise from Connecticut to California, where they recently performed, although the band usually plays no farther west than Chicago. Mr. Sangiovanni said part of the quartet’s appeal is its chemistry with a range of audiences. “We’ve had little kids, college kids, hipster kids, older folk-type crowds,” he said. “Some places we go they’ve never heard of us, but then you see the transition on their faces. It’s mostly a little shocked to, ‘Whoa, this is interesting,’ to ‘This is awesome.’ ” Audience participation is also big: For the Halloween shows, the band will ask fans to dress as a favorite character from one of their songs. Connecticut audiences, Mr. Sangiovanni said, are more likely to play along than those they have played for elsewhere. “People in Connecticut have had a chance to get used to us,” he said. “We also have a history with other bands here, so it’s not like, ‘Who are these guys?’ It’s very much our home base — our strongest, most loyal fans are here.” | Halloween;Music;Fairfield County (Conn) |
ny0293199 | [
"technology",
"personaltech"
] | 2016/06/17 | Unhitching the PC From OneDrive | Q. How do I make all my files stop automatically downloading to the OneDrive in Windows 10 Home Edition? Can I just get rid of OneDrive? I never use it. A. OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud-storage service that synchronizes files on your PC with its online servers, is part of the Window 10 operating system and cannot be fully uninstalled . If you prefer to keep your files stored on your computer, you can turn off the automatic syncing function and hide the program from view so you do not have to use it or even see it in the Windows File Explorer. To start disengaging OneDrive from your system, right-click its icon in the taskbar (or press and hold the icon on a touch-screen computer) and select Settings from the menu. If you do not see the double-cloud OneDrive icon, click the taskbar’s upward-pointing arrow to open the menu of hidden icons, locate the OneDrive icon and right-click it from there. Once the OneDrive Settings box is open on the screen, click though its tabs to disable its syncing functions. On the Settings tab, turn off the checkboxes in the General area. On the Auto Save tab, set the drop-down menu options next to Documents and Pictures to This PC Only, and turn off the checkboxes for storing photos, videos and screen shots online. On the Account tab, click the Unlink OneDrive button. (Users who wish to keep files currently stored online on OneDrive but remove copies of those files from the PC should click the Choose Folders button on the Account tab, turn off all the checkboxes next to file and folder names, click the O.K. button — and then go back into the Settings box and click the Unlink OneDrive button on the Account tab.) If you see a box welcoming you to OneDrive, just close it. Once you have stopped the files from syncing, you can hide the OneDrive icon in the File Explorer. Click the File Explorer icon in the taskbar to open the window and right-click the OneDrive icon. Choose Properties from the menu, click the General tab and click the box next to Hidden in the Attributes section. Finally, go back to the Notifications area of the taskbar, right-click the OneDrive icon and choose Exit to remove it there. | Computer data storage;Microsoft Windows;Microsoft |
ny0257165 | [
"business"
] | 2011/01/05 | Rally Stalls on Wall Street | A rally that pushed stocks up nearly 7 percent in December paused Tuesday as traders shrugged off a pickup in factory orders and sales gains at General Motors and Ford. Stocks started with gains but mostly fell throughout the day, even after a better-than-expected report on factory orders for November. Ryan Detrick, a senior analyst at Schaeffer’s Investment Research, said investors were holding off after a sharp jump in stocks on Monday. “We had a big start to the year yesterday,” Mr. Detrick said. The Dow rose 20.43 points, or 0.2 percent, to end the day at 11,691.18. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index dipped 1.67 points, or 0.1 percent, to close at 1,270.20. The Nasdaq lost 10.27 points, or 0.4 percent, to 2,681.25. Investors also received minutes from the Federal Reserve’s last policy meeting in December. Fed officials said signs of economic growth were not enough to cut back its $600 billion bond-buying program, which is aimed at encouraging spending by keeping interest rates low. Fed officials said more time was needed before they would consider changing their plans. Automakers reported December and year-end sales figures. General Motors rose 2.3 percent, to $37.90, after reporting that its sales in the United States rose 6.3 percent last year. Ford Motor gained 0.8 percent, to $17.38. “These companies finally have the right cost structure and all the players on board to make them profitable businesses,” said Frank Ingarra, a manager at Hennessy Funds. “The companies that survived are benefiting from facing less competition.” Several grocery store chains, including Supervalu, Safeway and Whole Foods Market, all fell more than 3 percent after a round of analyst downgrades. Alcoa jumped 4.6 percent to $16.52 to lead the 30 stocks that make up the Dow. McDonald’s lost 3 percent to $74.31. Treasury prices were mixed after the Fed minutes were released. The Treasury’s 10-year note rose 1/32, to 94 4/32. The yield was unchanged at 3.33 percent. Oil prices dropped Tuesday after climbing above a 26-month high, as investors wondered if the price of crude had climbed too high too fast. After weeks of mostly positive global economic news, the price of oil has risen over the last month from about $88 a barrel. “The mentality has just been buy it, buy it, buy it,” said Tom Bentz, analyst at BNP Paribas Commodity Futures. “The question everyone has is, How much further do we have to go before we start stunting the economic recovery?” Spot oil prices lost $2.17 to settle at $89.38 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Gene McGillian, an analyst at Tradition Energy, said he believed that the momentum would continue to carry oil prices toward $95 to $100 a barrel. “What you’re starting to see is that we might have gotten a bit overextended, so more vulnerable to profit-taking,” he said. | Stocks and Bonds;Nikkei Stock Average |
ny0062792 | [
"technology",
"personaltech"
] | 2014/01/09 | A Rugged Camera, Despite Design Flaws | Nikon’s new AW1 is a tough little camera. You can bash it on rocks, take it under water and use it in the worst ski conditions. It is solid, workmanlike and it fills a niche between pocket cameras and expensive, professional rigs. I just wish I could love it a little more. It’s a sturdy device that fairly screams rugged. But for all of the work Nikon did to make it simple, some of its controls can still be tricky to use. Before I got into more detail about why I’m in not in love with this camera, let me explain why I am in like with it. The AW1, part of the Nikon 1 brand, is one of a new breed of digital camera: compact and mirrorless. It is small and highly automated. It’s not quite a digital single-lens reflex camera but, like those professional cameras, it gives users control over image settings. The AW1, which costs $800, stands out from its peers in this middle ground. It is for people who want an almost-pro camera that can’t be easily damaged. The usual ports for charging and inserting memory cards and the USB socket for connecting to a computer are covered on the AW1 with sturdy little flaps. These seal firmly to keep out grit and water. They also have two catches that have to be clicked in sequence to be undone, so you won’t accidentally do something like open your camera’s sensitive inside parts under water. The AW1’s hand grips feel like sharply knurled metal and they stay firmly stuck to your hand. And turning the lens take a little effort — it doesn’t twirl like a lens on a cheap plastic camera. There’s a reassuring weight to the device, and it feels balanced when you hold it up to take a photo. It is easier to keep steady than a much lighter smartphone. The first time I used it, the camera felt so professional, in fact, that I raised it to my eye to take a shot as I would my D.S.L.R. It was a funny moment, since the AW1 doesn’t have a viewfinder, and to frame a shot you have to look at the screen on its back. I took the camera with me on a short ski trip. I stood it on rocks, slid it accidentally over pebbles and propped it up on an impromptu snow “tripod.” I also happily skied with it in my hand to take an action video, got it thoroughly wet and freezing cold. I even accidentally dropped it on a hard floor from chest height — a drop like this would have wrecked my D.S.L.R. and its lens. But the AW1 stood up to the abuse, without getting dents in its plastic or scratches on its rear screen. Image A snowy scene full of contrast, captured in full-auto mode using the Nikon AW1 camera. Credit Kit Eaton I have to say that this hardiness is reassuring. One of the nicest features of the camera is its fast-access menu. When you’re skiing with gloves or diving or even climbing, the menu allows you to change camera settings with just one hand. Image Credit Stuart Goldenberg The menu is activated with a button near the natural resting spot of your right thumb. A semicircular display appears on screen, with a pointer indicating what mode your camera is in. By holding the button, then rotating the camera body, the pointer can be spun to select a different camera mode. Need to switch from full-automatic mode to slow-motion video? Just rotate. This isn’t full access to everything the camera can do, but it lets you swap between some common settings quickly. Similarly, a dedicated video button means you don’t have to fuss with small buttons and menus to record a video. Once you get the hang of its controls and the heft of it in your hand, the camera takes great images and HD video with its 1-inch, 14.2 megapixel sensor. And that’s good, because that’s really the only thing you want it to do. Like its lesser point-and-shoot digital camera cousins, the AW1 works well in fully automatic mode where you let its smart circuitry choose settings like aperture and shutter and so on. It coped beautifully with awkward backlighting situations caused by the sun on snowy mountains. The camera offers additional, built-in special effects: One makes a photo of a cityscape look like a photo of a model city. The automatic panorama-generating mode, which uses motion sensors inside the camera just like those in your smartphone, is also very impressive. Image A feature of the AW1 can make a photo of a cityscape look like a photo of a model city. Credit Kit Eaton There are even some nice video effects, like a short, slow-motion clip capture. My favorite is the “motion snapshot” effect, which generates a brief video of the event you have snapped and a final still frame of the best moment in the clip. It even overlays cheesy music. While the automated modes are fun, the whole point of this sort of camera is that you can set the aperture sizes, shutter time and so on manually. This lets you choose how much of the image is in focus, how bright it is and so on. These manual modes work just as well as on a “proper” D.S.L.R. camera, though it is perhaps more of a fuss to do in the AW1’s menus than it is on a big camera with dedicated buttons. This leads me to what I did not love about this camera. Nikon doesn’t get all of the design detail right. It’s easy to confuse the video button with the next-door shutter button. The rugged metal grips feel curiously small when held in a gloved hand — which isn’t good for action photography. The small rubber thumb pad on the camera’s rear, where your thumb normally goes when holding a camera, is amusingly small. It’s easy to roll your thumb off this pad onto the nearby control buttons on the camera’s back if you are not paying attention. The menu system is also confusing. It’s easy to get a little lost in the submenus and swapping between modes can also be tricky. Also, there are annoying quirks in the user interface. It has some awkward buttons and there are a few feature omissions. For the $800 price, it would have been nice to have a Wi-Fi chip inside to make getting photos and videos onto a PC much simpler. As it is, you have to open the camera’s flaps and plug in cables or extract the SD card. The AW1 does do more or less exactly what it promises on the box. While I can’t say I love it, I do like it rather a lot. And so might you, especially if you’re an outdoors type with deep pockets. | Camera;Photography;Video;Nikon |
ny0193639 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2009/11/02 | If Fox Is Partisan, It Is Not Alone | The Obama White House’s decision to challenge Fox News appears driven equally by strategy and frustration. It is also a test case for politicians in both parties. That is because partisan fragmentation throughout America’s news media and their audiences has grown significantly. Future Republican presidents will have to decide, as Team Obama has, how to buck or accommodate that trend. Fox News has attracted the most attention because of its “fair and balanced” challenge to its competitors and its success. But the audiences of its competitors have tilted sharply in the other direction. (This reporter is chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and hosts “The New York Times Special Edition,” a program on MSNBC.) Press critics worry that the rise of media polarization threatens the foundation of credible, common information that American politics needs to thrive. Will Feltus, a Republican specialist in voter targeting, does not. If it complicates the choices facing leaders in Washington, Mr. Feltus argues, it also decentralizes political communication in a way that is both inevitable and healthy in the information age. “I feel no hand-wringing about it,” Mr. Feltus said. “People are smart enough to understand what color filter is over the lens.” Roots of a Trend The evolution of political news on television, in print and on the Internet has a certain back-to-the-future feel. As the American Revolution approached in the 18th century, wrote William David Sloan and Julie Hedgepeth Williams in the book “The Early American Press, 1690-1783,” journalists “were expected to be partisan — intensely partisan.” Mr. Feltus charted the rising partisanship of television news audiences using data from Scarborough Research, a partnership of the Nielsen Company and Arbitron Inc. In audience surveys from August 2000 to March 2001, Fox News viewers tilted Republican by 44.6 percent to 36.1 percent. More narrowly — 41.4 percent to 39.4 percent — so did the audience for MSNBC. The audiences of CNN, Headline News, CNBC and Comedy Central leaned Democratic. Four years later, amid the Iraq war and President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign, the audience data had shifted. Fox News viewers had become 51 percent Republican and just 30.8 percent Democratic, while MSNBC viewers leaned Democratic by 41.7 percent to 40.4 percent. Viewers of CNN, Headline News, CNBC and Comedy Central grew slightly more Democratic. By 2008-9, the network audiences tilted decisively, like Fox’s. CNN viewers were more Democratic by 50.4 percent to 28.7 percent; MSNBC viewers were 53.6 percent to 27.3 percent Democratic; Headline News’ 47.3 percent to 31.4 percent Democratic; CNBC’s 46.9 percent to 32.5 percent Democratic; and Comedy Central’s 47.1 to 28.8 percent Democratic. Breeding Divisiveness Those decade-long trends track deepening partisan passions and decisions by cable news programmers to amplify strong opinions. They help campaign strategists in both parties direct political ads. “It makes it easier to find your voters,” said a Democratic pollster, Anna Greenberg. Mark Mellman, a strategist for the Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, in 2004, found that regular Fox News viewers supported Mr. Bush over Mr. Kerry by 88 percent to 7 percent — a more lopsided tilt than among gun owners, evangelical Christians or Iraq war supporters. Mr. Mellman also said that the current media environment was a hothouse for political misinformation. The drift of public opinion during Mr. Obama’s presidency suggests that news coverage of the health care fight and other controversies has ratcheted up the intensity of sentiment among presidential allies and adversaries alike. “It’s one more really powerful force that makes it difficult to get some sort of stable governing majority,” said a Republican pollster, Bill McInturff, who advised John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. Mr. Obama’s aides signaled their unhappiness over that fact by criticizing Fox News as more an arm of the Republican Party than a practitioner of conventional journalism. They also sought to dissuade other news organizations from following Fox’s lead in trumpeting stories the White House views as a distraction from their governing priorities. The success or failure of that effort may serve as a model for its White House successors. Though polarization among news audiences may be approaching its limit, given the partisan make-up of the electorate, there is no sign it is going away. Mr. Feltus predicts the strategy will backfire by offending the subset of Fox viewers who Obama might otherwise be able to lure with his policies on issues such as health care. “If I were the Obama White House, I’d make my target uninsured people who watch Fox,” he said, because “I’ve got the answer to their problem.” Besides, Mr. Feltus observed, winning over the other side starts with working to understand it. “As a Republican, I sometimes watch Keith Olbermann,” the MSNBC host, he said, though “I can usually only do it for 10 minutes.” | News and News Media;Cable Television;Fox News Channel;MSNBC;Republican Party;Obama Barack |
ny0142928 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2008/11/23 | Airstrike Kills Qaeda-Linked Militant in Pakistan | PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A British militant who was a liaison to Al Qaeda and was a main suspect in the plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners in 2006 was killed Saturday in a missile strike by an American aircraft in northern Pakistan, senior Pakistani and American officials said. The militant, Rashid Rauf, was among the five people killed in the attack by a remotely piloted aircraft in North Waziristan, close to the Afghan border, the officials said. He is perhaps the best-known of the figures killed in an American airstrike campaign there that has intensified since August and has caused increased strains between the United States and Pakistan. In August 2006, Mr. Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani descent, was detained in Pakistan, leading to the arrest of 25 suspects in Britain in connection with what prosecutors said was a plot to destroy seven airliners headed for the United States and Canada. This September, a British jury convicted three of eight defendants of conspiracy to commit murder, failing to reach verdicts on the more serious charge of using beverage bottles filled with liquid explosives to blow up the aircraft. But Mr. Rauf was not among those defendants. All terrorism charges against him in that case were dropped in December 2006. A year later, he slipped out of his handcuffs and ran from his guards after a court hearing in Islamabad, Pakistan, on a separate case in which he faced extradition to Britain. Pakistani officials confirmed on Saturday that Mr. Rauf was the main target of the American missile strike, with Abu Zubair al-Masri, an operative of Al Qaeda. “Rashid Rauf and al-Masri were the targets and have apparently been killed in the missile strike,” a senior government official said. In Washington, an American official confirmed the death of Mr. Rauf. “There are good reasons to believe, as the Pakistanis have said, that this major terrorist is gone,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Residents in the village of Alikhel, in the Mirali area of North Waziristan, said two missiles hit the well-guarded compound of a Taliban commander, Maulvi Khaliq Noor, Saturday morning. Three children were wounded in the attack, the residents said. Brought up in Britain by parents who were Pakistani immigrants from Kashmir, Mr. Rauf, 27, settled in southern Punjab Province in Pakistan in 2002. He married into a family at the center of the Army of Muhammad, an outlawed Islamist group. When Pakistani authorities arrested him in August 2006, the interior minister at the time, Aftab Ahmed Sherpao, called him “a key Al Qaeda operative.” Mr. Rauf was described at the time as being instrumental in devising the airline plot. The British police, who had the group in Britain under surveillance at the time, complained that the Pakistani police arrested Mr. Rauf too early and forced them to round up the suspects in Britain before enough incriminating evidence had been gathered. Mr. Rauf’s escape was particularly embarrassing to the government because it showed police laxity a day after Pervez Musharraf, who was president then, had announced that the security forces had thwarted the militants and that stability was returning to Pakistan. Mr. Rauf was wanted in Britain as a suspect in the murder of an uncle who was stabbed in Birmingham in April 2002. The missile strike in North Waziristan on Saturday was the third by the Americans in almost three days. Since August, there have been more than two dozen strikes by remotely piloted aircraft, including one last week that hit a settled area in the North-West Frontier Province outside the tribal region. American military commanders have declared the strikes successful in eliminating important Qaeda and Taliban figures. But the Pakistani authorities have protested that the strikes are an infringement of national sovereignty and harm the government’s efforts to persuade the Pakistani public that the war against the militants is in the country’s interest. Many Pakistanis argue that the American missile strikes are responsible for the suicide bomb attacks that have struck law enforcement targets, funerals and politicians in the North-West Frontier Province and in Islamabad, the capital. After the strike on Saturday, a Taliban spokesman, Ahmadullah Ahmadi, said that no foreigners had been killed. “Americans have killed innocent people and none of them were foreigners,” he said in a statement issued on behalf of a top militant commander, Hafiz Gul Bahadar, in Miram Shah, the main town in North Waziristan. Mr. Ahmadi said the militants would seek revenge. “We will avenge the death of innocent people by striking in settled areas” against security forces, he said. | Rauf Rashid;Al Qaeda;Pakistan;Terrorism;Waziristan (Pakistan);Great Britain |
ny0271960 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2016/05/11 | Chinese Panel Rules Against Plaintiff in Transgender Job Discrimination Case | BEIJING — A labor arbitration panel in the southwestern Chinese province of Guizhou ruled on Tuesday against a transgender man, the plaintiff and his lawyer said, in what has been described as the country’s first transgender job discrimination case . The plaintiff, 28, who has been identified in Chinese state news media only as Mr. C and has declined to provide his real name out of privacy concerns, was born a woman, but has said he considered himself a man and has worn men’s clothes since college. He filed his case in March with a labor arbitration committee in Guiyang, the provincial capital, after the Ciming Health Checkup Center dismissed him last year after a brief probation period on the grounds that he dressed like a gay man and would strike customers as “unhealthy,” Mr. C quoted a human resources manager as saying in an earlier interview. The panel ordered the company to pay Mr. C 402.30 renminbi, about $61, as Mr. C’s wage for his one-week probation period, and rejected his demand for an additional month’s pay, about 2,000 renminbi, as compensation and a written apology, Mr. C’s lawyer, Huang Sha, said in a telephone interview. In a text message, Mr. C said he was disappointed by the ruling and would file a court case soon. “Although I got the wage, but that wasn’t what I have wanted at all,” he said. “In the process of this case, I learned that discrimination against gender expression and transgender individuals is even more serious than I imagined. I hope the law wouldn’t keep supporting discrimination.” Mr. Huang said that the panel accepted the company’s argument that it fired Mr. C because he was incompetent and said that the manager’s comments on Mr. C’s appearance, which Mr. C recorded, did not represent the company’s view. “What I’m worried about the most is that the ruling has been a result of politics instead of arbitration,” Mr. Huang said. A woman who answered the telephone Tuesday afternoon at the office of Jin Yuping, the Ciming Health Checkup Center’s human resources manager, said that Ms. Jin had left work and would not be available for comment. The company, which had said at the first hearing, on April 11, that it had fired Mr. C because he was incompetent, accused Mr. C at the second hearing, on April 29, of missing work for a day and said that the decision to fire him was made jointly by the company’s shareholders, Mr. Huang said. Mr. C denied that he had been absent from his job. In late April, after Mr. C’s case and three others — one involving a woman and two cases involving H.I.V.-positive men who said they faced job discrimination, 32 lawyers across 14 Chinese provinces formed an “ anti-labor discrimination lawyers’ group ” to provide legal assistance to individuals and companies. Tingting Shen, a director of advocacy, research and policy at Asia Catalyst, an organization in New York that works with transgender people in China, expressed regret over the ruling on Tuesday, saying “China’s legal system failed to recognize the issue of discrimination against gender identity and gender expression in the workplace.” Still, Ms. Shen, who is based in Beijing, called the case a “landmark,” adding that Mr. C’s courage would encourage more transgender people to stand up for their rights. | Transgender,Gender Dysphoria;Discrimination;Lawsuits;China;Asia Catalyst |
ny0164835 | [
"technology"
] | 2006/10/30 | BBC Plan for Web Ads Draws Fire | Critics in England have attacked plans by the BBC to sell advertising on its Web site. Now some of those critics inside the BBC are redoubling their efforts. Employees from the Web site have circulated a 10-page document condemning the proposal, which they say could lead to less serious journalism and damage the BBC’s reputation. Management is “not seeing the bigger picture of what the BBC is really about,” said one employee, who did not want his name used for fear of reprisal. Earlier this year, more than 170 BBC Web site employees signed a petition protesting the idea. The BBC, which is financed mainly from fees paid by British television owners and government grants, does not carry advertising on its public television channels, although BBC World, the corporation’s television show outside of Britain, does carry ads, as do its magazines. The BBC Web site is viewed by four million people a day, though the ads will be visible only to readers outside Britain. Jennie Allen, a spokeswoman for BBC Worldwide, said, “We’re still working through the approval process.” She said the BBC hoped that the ads would go up before the end of its fiscal year in March. BBC’s increasing commercialization is highly controversial in Britain. For-profit competitors complain that the corporation will steal valuable advertising revenue from them, and analysts say the BBC may be traveling down a slippery slope. “In the end they have to be extremely careful about how they do it to be sure they don’t slide into becoming a commercial broadcaster,” said Roy Greenslade, a professor at City University and media critic at the Guardian newspaper. If the BBC is successful at taking ads, people may say that the fee they charge the television-owning public should be removed, Mr. Greenslade said. “That immediately removes the independence that the broadcaster has,” he said, making it subject to the same commercial pressures of any other broadcasting organization. BBC journalists worry that adding advertising to the Web site will lead to changes in news coverage. “There has to be a chance that advertisers wouldn’t care about us doing stories on poverty and African politics, they’d want us to do more stories on Madonna and Kylie,” one Web site employee said, referring to the singer Kylie Minogue. Ms. Allen said the company was well aware that the idea was not popular with some employees. “There is absolutely no question of advertisers having any influence over the content,” she said. | BBC Worldwide Ltd;Advertising and Marketing;Computers and the Internet;Television;Great Britain |
ny0161434 | [
"business"
] | 2006/04/08 | Pedicure Soothes and Tingles, Leaving Manliness Intact | Correction Appended I'M a whole lot more sinner than saint, but I know a religious experience when I have one, even if it's only once or twice a millennium. My first religious experience of the 21st century began on an otherwise unholy Wednesday afternoon when I arrived at John Allan's Club at 46 East 46th Street in Manhattan in executive pursuit of a pedicure. Yes, that's right, I said a pedicure, as in a manicure and massage of the feet. At the risk of completely decimating my carefully cultivated macho image, I must confess I felt like a virgin bride. I have had my share of hand manicures over the years, and thanks to repeated sports injuries, more than my share of full body massages. But I'd had zero pedicures. My wife and almost every woman I knew swore by them, which only piqued my curiosity even as it made me feel like that much bigger of a big sissy. I was greeted at the door of John Allan's by a young fellow with dreadlocks named Diego. He took my coat, and helped me into a thigh-length cotton robe. Then he led me on a tour to show why the club's frosted glass windows promised "a return to a simpler time when a man had a place he could call his own." Like a set from a boxing movie, the bustling main room had concrete floors and bare walls with exposed pipes. It featured a hair salon with leather club chairs, a shoeshine stall, adjacent massage rooms, a smoking room, a pool room and bar. Save for Diego and a handful of other valets, the staff consisted of women in uniform black pants and tops catering to an overflow contingent of clients that was, as per club policy, exclusively male. "You're getting a full service?' Diego asked. By that, he meant a $65 treatment that included a hot towel facial, a haircut, a manicure, and a shoeshine, and lasted a little over half an hour. "And a pedicure," I mumbled, staring down at my shoelaces. A pedicure at John Allan's cost $49, and took 45 minutes, but I figured it could make me the butt of my drinking buddies' barbs from here to eternity. Presently, I met the pedicurist, Priscilla Albuquerque. She was 24 years old, Brazilian born, with brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and sparkling silver earrings. "I admire guys who are taking better care of themselves," she said. "The first time they come for a pedicure, I see this look on their faces like, 'Oh, my God, what am I doing?' But once they try it, they get addicted and come back every week." Priscilla escorted me across the concrete floor, and into a dimly lighted private room furnished with another club chair, a side table and a stool. She closed the door. "Take off your shoes and socks, and roll up your pants," she said. I did as directed. Then I plopped into the club chair and closed my eyes, listening to Priscilla run water into a metal washtub and pondering the resurgent boom in the upscale men's grooming industry. According to a report in the online marketing newsletter Direct, worldwide sales of grooming products exceed $200 billion a year. Although women account for the vast majority of that figure, men spent over $16 billion in 2003, up 7 percent from the year before. "Demand for male-specific brands of personal care products has outstripped the general market for the last few years, particularly among young men," the Direct report noted. "The market research firm Kline & Company said this trend for greater awareness and acceptance of products in this category has been reinforced by the Bravo cable television show 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,' and magazines such as Men's Health, Stuff and GQ." John Allan's recent growth spurt attested to the trend. The son of a New Jersey family that owned taverns and billiard halls, John Allan Meing, 49, started as a hair stylist apprentice in the Paris salon of Jean Louis David. In 1988, he opened the first John Allan's Club at 95 Trinity Place in the downtown financial district. "I didn't think New York needed another women's salon," Mr. Meing recalled in an interview. "I wanted to change the environment and bring a new face to the men's business." Mr. Meing opened a second club on 46th Street in the fall of 2001, an outlet in Saks Fifth Avenue in November 2005, and a fourth location in TriBeCa last month. Over the last three years, he has introduced lines of hair care and skin care products for men. He said he now caters to more than 8,000 clients annually. Half are walk-in customers who pay as they go, and half are members who pay a fee of $720 a year (not including tips) to partake of any and all services offered. He plans to expand to Atlanta, Miami, Las Vegas, Los Angles and London over the coming 18 months. I blinked open my eyes just as Priscilla returned with the washtub. It was filled with John Allan's Body Wash and lined with a bed of rocks. I plunged in both feet. Priscilla crouched on the stool, lifted each foot from the water, and clipped my toenails. She gently rubbed each foot with a scrub brush, removing bits of loose and dry skin. Then she applied heaping handfuls of a lukewarm granular purple goop from my ankles to my toes. "It's basically oil, salt and water," she explained. "It helps take off all the extra skin to make your feet real smooth." The purple goop felt good on my feet, real good, but I was also starting to feel obscenely overpampered. I asked Priscilla about her life. She told me she was a single mother with a 5-year-old daughter. She worked at John Allan's Club four days a week, she said, and attended night classes at a local cosmetology school, where she was studying for a hair stylist license. "I go to bed about 1 a.m., then I get up at 6 and start all over," she said. Priscilla wiped off the purple goop and applied some much smoother green goop. She said the green goop was a dermatological masque to clean out the pores of my feet. "People around here are always saying, 'But you never get to go out,' " she added, massaging my feet with a sigh. "I tell them I have too much to do with my daughter. But it's all worth it when she says, 'I know how hard you work, and I'm proud of you, Mommy.' " I'm not particularly ticklish, but I felt a tingle from the tips of my toes to the tips of my ears. I closed my eyes again and began to muse about "The Da Vinci Code" and its portrayal of the pioneering biblical pedicurist Mary Magdalene. Soon to be released as a Hollywood movie, the best-selling novel contends that Mary Magdalene married Jesus and bore children whose descendants are living in France. But Priscilla and I were raised Catholic. Our catechism cast Mary Magdalene as a childless sinner, a repentant prostitute who washed Jesus's feet with her hair and subsequently witnessed both his Crucifixion and his Resurrection. Suddenly, I felt Priscilla patting my calves. "You're good to go," she declared. I snapped out of my religious reverie, and looked at my feet. They were pink and clean and smooth as fresh-picked peaches, and they felt like they could fly me to heaven. If Priscilla wasn't a modern day Mary Magdalene, I reckoned she qualified for sainthood on the basis of her parenting and professional expertise. I told her so, and tipped her $40. "Wow, "she said. "That's awesome." I put on my socks and shoes, still tingling all over. Then I strode out of John Allan's Club and back into the unholy Wednesday afternoon on my perfectly pedicured soles. EXECUTIVE PURSUITS Correction: April 11, 2006, Tuesday A picture caption in Business Day on Saturday with the Executive Pursuits column, about men who get pedicures, misstated the surname of a customer at John Allan's Club in Manhattan. He was Michael B. Strauss, not Stauss. | JOHN ALLAN'S;MEN;MASSAGE;BEAUTY SALONS;FEET |
ny0196518 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2009/10/21 | Bernard Kerik Jailed as U.S. Judge Angrily Revokes Bail | Bernard B. Kerik , the city’s former police commissioner, was sent to jail Tuesday by a federal judge who said Mr. Kerik had leaked sealed information from his future criminal trial as part of an attempt to generate public sympathy. Judge Stephen C. Robinson of Federal District Court in White Plains revoked Mr. Kerik’s $500,000 bail and delivered a withering criticism of Mr. Kerik from the bench, describing him as a “toxic combination of self-minded focus and arrogance.” “And I fear that combination leads him to believe his ends justify his means,” Judge Robinson said. “He sees the court’s rulings as an inconvenience, something to be ignored, and an obstacle to be circumvented.” Mr. Kerik, 54, who was once President Bush’s top choice to lead the Department of Homeland Security , faces three criminal trials in federal court. Jury selection in the first trial — in which he faces corruption, conspiracy and tax fraud charges — is to begin on Monday. Judge Robinson said Mr. Kerik had violated the terms of his bail in providing the sealed information to a New Jersey lawyer who has helped raise money for Mr. Kerik’s defense but is not formally part of the defense team. The lawyer, Anthony K. Modafferi III, e-mailed the material to The Washington Times in an effort to generate coverage that would disparage prosecutors, Judge Robinson said. The judge did not reveal the nature of the information, which remains under seal, but said the newspaper did not publish any of it. Mr. Kerik’s lawyers asked the judge to let their client remain free for 48 hours while they prepared an appeal, but Judge Robinson rejected the request. At the end of the four-hour hearing, Mr. Kerik, who ran the city’s jail system before becoming police commissioner, methodically removed a tie and a gold medallion from his neck. He pulled a wallet and a few papers from his pocket, said goodbye to his lawyers and walked with federal marshals through a rear door of the crowded courtroom without glancing back. Mr. Kerik’s lawyer, Barry H. Berke, said he planned to appeal the decision, but declined to comment further. Interestingly, both the judge and the defendant worked under former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani . Mr. Kerik was appointed commissioner of the Correction and Police Departments by Mr. Giuliani and later worked at Mr. Giuliani’s private consulting firm. In the 1980s, Judge Robinson served as a federal prosecutor under Mr. Giuliani, who was then the United States attorney in Manhattan. Mr. Kerik’s lawyers have described Mr. Modafferi, who did not return calls, as someone who occasionally provides free legal advice to Mr. Kerik. A blog item posted under Mr. Modafferi’s name this year criticized the news media and prosecutors for going after Mr. Kerik and giving a pass to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who admitted during his confirmation that he had failed to pay more than $34,000 in federal taxes over several years. “Kerik was, and is, a scapegoat for the anger of those who couldn’t stand Giuliani and were fearful that he would be the Republican nominee for president,” the posting said. Prosecutors have alleged that while Mr. Kerik was correction commissioner, a construction company paid for renovations at his home in the Bronx in the hope that he would help the company obtain a city license. Mr. Kerik also faces federal charges that he failed to report more than $500,000 in income while he was in charge of the Correction and Police Departments, and that he provided false information while being considered for the nomination as secretary of homeland security. Mr. Kerik has pleaded not guilty to the federal charges. In 2006, he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors in state court stemming from the apartment renovation. The issue of leaked material in the first federal case had been brewing for some time. Last year, prosecutors accused another lawyer, who was not formally involved in the Kerik case, of passing confidential information, which they said he had obtained from Mr. Kerik, to potential witnesses. At that time, Judge Robinson threatened Mr. Kerik with jail if he ever again violated the consent order barring parties in the case from revealing confidential information about it. Last month, Judge Robinson asked the defense team to submit briefs about the e-mail message from Mr. Modafferi. “My thought is the relationship between Mr. Modafferi and Mr. Kerik has little to do with legal counsel,” the judge said at the time. “He’s hired Mr. Modafferi as a propagandist and chief fund-raiser.” On Tuesday, Michael F. Bachner, a lawyer for Mr. Kerik, argued that the consent order was vague. Defense lawyers said that the e-mail message that Mr. Kerik sent to Mr. Modafferi was labeled “confidential” and that Mr. Kerik believed that Mr. Modafferi would understand that it could not be made public. “There is no way that Mr. Kerik would engage in conduct that was bound to be discovered, and he had no reason to anger this court,” Mr. Bachner said. Mr. Bachner later added, “Mr. Modafferi ran with that ball on his own, which nobody condoned.” Judge Robinson’s rejection of that position went on at considerable length. He quoted much of Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 29 in likening Mr. Kerik to a man who, “in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,” laments his “outcast state.” Several people involved in the case said Mr. Kerik was to be held at the Westchester County Department of Correction jail in Valhalla, which has a section reserved for federal prisoners. A spokesman for the United States Marshal’s Service could not confirm his location. Thomas A. Reppetto, who co-wrote a history of the Police Department, said Mr. Kerik was the first former city police commissioner to be put in jail, and would be the first to be convicted of a crime should he be found guilty. “There have been investigations, but nothing like this,” said Mr. Reppetto. | Kerik Bernard B;Frauds and Swindling;Homeland Security Department;Police Department (NYC);Decisions and Verdicts;Robinson Stephen C;Giuliani Rudolph W;Federal District Courts;Reppetto Thomas A |
ny0228780 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2010/07/30 | From Fires to Fish, Heat Wave Batters Russia | RYBKHOZ, Russia — This is a country that knows how to handle the cold, swaggering about during the most brutal of winters. But the heat is another story. And there has never been heat like this. Here is how extreme it has become: Oymyakon in Eastern Siberia is considered one of the coldest places on Earth, with winter temperatures dropping to as low as minus 90 degrees. On Thursday, the thermometer also read 90 degrees. Plus 90. In the evening. Much of Russia has been reeling. Forest fires have erupted. Drought has ruined millions of acres of wheat . More than 2,000 people have died from drowning in rivers, reservoirs and elsewhere in July and June, often after seeking relief from the heat while intoxicated . In Moscow alone, the number of such deaths has tripled in comparison with last year, officials said. All week long, temperatures have been soaring to records, and on Thursday, they reached a new high for Moscow , 100 degrees. July has been the hottest month since the city began taking such measurements under the czars, 130 years ago, officials said. At the Biserovsky Fish Farm in this suburb of Moscow, Ivan Tyurkin trudged along a pier and surveyed the breeding ponds all around him. He did not need a thermometer to figure out that the water was treacherously tepid. Dead trout, drifting like buoys, were evidence enough. Last month, they were flipping and flopping and leaping, and Mr. Tyurkin was readying for another bountiful harvest. Now, with the weather finding seemingly endless ways of wreaking havoc across the country, the farm was in crisis. “This is all just very difficult to believe,” Mr. Tyurkin said. “There has never been a summer like this,” he said. “Never. Not once.” That is a widely held view in Russia. New York, Washington and many other cities in the United States have certainly suffered from their own heat waves. But most Russians do not have air-conditioners, reasoning that they are not worth the investment given the typical summers here. As if the heat were not enough, Moscow has lately been coated with a patina of smoke from fires that have broken out in dried-up peat bogs in the suburbs. Throw open a window in a desperate bid to catch a breeze and the unpleasant smell of smoke bounds in. One of the country’s chief medical authorities estimated that walking around Moscow for a few hours was the equivalent of smoking a pack or two of cigarettes. A little respite from the heat is expected on Friday, when the temperatures are predicted to drop to 88 degrees in Moscow, but next week they may jump to 100 again. When the heat wave hit Russia, agriculture seemed the first to fall victim across much of the country, with officials predicting that grain production could decline by as much as 25 percent. Now, fish farms like Biserovsky are struggling to keep their stocks alive. Here in the village of Rybkhoz, a name derived from the Russian words for “fish production,” the artificial ponds have been nurturing fish for local consumption since Nikita Khrushchev’s time. Trout is a relatively new venture for the Biserovsky farm, underscoring Moscow’s prosperity. In Soviet times, trout — let alone fresh trout — was viewed as a delicacy, but these days, it is much more available. It often retails for $5 to $7 a pound. Biserovsky also produces carp, which is heartier and able to endure warm water, so that harvest is not at risk — at least not yet. The farm said it had been expecting to harvest 100 tons of trout this year. Some died. The rest were prematurely sold — often at deep discounts — before they could be killed by the rising temperatures. About 30 percent of the live fish were in such bad shape that they could be used only for fish meal and other low-grade products. With the current harvest gone, Mr. Tyurkin, who oversees the trout ponds at Biserovsky, has been intent on rescuing next year’s stock. His workers have been crowding the juvenile fish into a single pond that they have tried to cool down, as if it were a refugee camp for survivors of a great meteorological cataclysm. “We realize that this may not have a great chance of succeeding, but if we don’t do this, they won’t have any chance at all,” Mr. Tyurkin said. He explained that trout thrive in water that is 55 to 62 degrees. In recent days, the water temperature has spiked to as high as 85 degrees near the surface. The trout swim deeper to seek cooler water, but the lower they go, the less oxygen is available. They either overheat or suffocate. Yuri Baranov, Biserovsky’s marketing director, said the heat had even paralyzed the farm’s ability to receive shipments of live trout that are raised elsewhere and then trucked here to be fattened up to their sale weight, usually about two pounds. “All around Russia, even in the north, they are having the same problems,” Mr. Baranov said. For now, the Biserovsky workers are pumping air into the ponds for the remaining stock, as well as circulating cooler water sucked up from the depths. Mr. Tyurkin, with his expansive belly and equally expansive manner of talking about fish, was clearly pained by it all. “These are like my children,” he said. “We see them when they are little hatchlings, then we watch them grow. And normally, you see the result of our work. But now, just look at this. They start dying, they float, and that’s it.” | Weather;Russia |
ny0051652 | [
"science"
] | 2014/10/01 | In Indonesia, Authorities Stop Sale of Endangered Manta Rays | Indonesian authorities announced on Tuesday four separate arrests in connection with the attempted trafficking of more than 1,400 pounds of threatened manta rays. The arrests were made over the last month across the country. A fish trader named Wrm, who like many Indonesians used only one name , was arrested last week in West Java for attempting to sell a 132-pound manta ray. Earlier this month, authorities stopped the sale of 53 sawfish ray snouts in Bali. And in August, two additional arrests stopped the illegal sale of 110 pounds of manta ray gill plates and 28 pounds of marine turtle meat. Reef and oceanic manta rays are two newly protected species under Indonesian law. Trafficking manta rays now carries a maximum fine of $25,000 in Indonesia. “It’s very reassuring to see the Indonesian Fisheries Ministry acting on the national protection they granted manta rays earlier this year,” said Paul Hilton, associate director for the Manta Trust , a nonprofit organization for the conservation of manta rays. Manta rays are often killed for their gill plates, which are thin cartilage fibers that filter plankton, one of their main food sources. The gill plates are in high demand in China, where they are used in a health tonic in traditional Chinese medicine. Annually the total trade is worth $30 million, according to a recent report by the conservation group WildAid . Oceanic manta rays can reach up to 23 feet in length and live more than 20 years. Like sharks and other ray species, oceanic rays give birth to only one live pup every two years. Their low reproductive rates make them especially vulnerable, said Caleb McClennen, executive director of marine conversation at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “The problem is very acute with sharks and rays because of their reproductive strategy,” he said. The oceanic and reef manta rays are both listed as vulnerable on an international list of threatened species. But a growing tourism business based on manta watching may help keep illegal wildlife trading down. The enterprise is estimated to be worth $140 million annually worldwide, with Indonesia as one of the top-10 destinations, according to a 2013 study published in the journal PLoS one. Scientists say they think that this lucrative industry will help but that more investment is needed. “I think we have moved past awareness and need to move to action,” Mr. McClennen said. “Hopefully Indonesia will be seen as a leading role model that other countries will follow.” | Smuggling;Fish;Indonesia |
ny0020439 | [
"sports",
"cycling"
] | 2013/07/14 | Toiling in Anonymity, Lead-Out Riders Blaze the Paths for Sprinters | LYON, France — They are among the most dangerous 200 yards in sports, a rolling scrum of carbon fiber machines carrying men wearing nothing but Lycra at speeds greater than 40 miles per hour. Shoulders bump, tempers flare, handlebars knock. When crashes occur, they are skin tearing and bone crunching. This is the domain of the Tour de France sprint. In a sport dominated by greyhounds with pencil-thin necks and scrawny arms, the sprinters come the closest to being muscle men. Their nicknames say much about their image: the Gorilla (Andre Greipel), the Hulk (Peter Sagan) and the Manx Missile (Mark Cavendish). But for all their swagger and killer instincts, even the fastest sprinters would rarely succeed without the well-oiled efforts of teammates, who shelter them in the final miles of long races and then launch them for the final dash, in what is known as a lead-out train. On Saturday, one of those lead-out riders enjoyed a rare day in the spotlight. Matteo Trentin, an Italian who works for Cavendish on the Omega Pharma-Quick Step team, won Stage 14 by less than a wheel at the end of a long breakaway. And he did it in a sprint, no less (with no teammates to lead him out). “When you arrive at the finish line, it is just your legs,” a beaming Trentin said after the race. Chris Froome of Sky ProCycling retained the leader’s yellow jersey at the end of the 118-mile stage through the rolling hills of central France, from St.-Pourçain-sur-Sioule to Lyon. Bauk Mollema of the Belkin team remained in second, 2 minutes 28 seconds back, and Alberto Contador of Saxo-Tinkoff held third, 2:45 behind. Saturday was a perfect chance for the lesser-known riders to try for glory, as the general-classification leaders seemed content to rest their legs in preparation for Sunday’s race, to the summit of Mont Ventoux, which will begin a week of climbing. When Trentin crossed the finish line, he cupped his hands around his helmet with a look of glee and shock. During a news conference later, he was asked how it felt to appear on a podium reserved for winners. “I never do it before,” he said in halting English. “Yeah, for sure a good feeling.” More often than not, though, lead-out men like him toil in anonymity. On Saturday, as Gert Steegmans, the main lead-out rider for Omega Pharma-Quick Step, chatted with a reporter outside the team bus, a passing fan asked, “Is that Cavendish?” Yet their work is not for the fainthearted. The lead-outs — sometimes there is only one — must be nearly as fast as the bursts by the best sprinters themselves, so they can increase the pace in the final miles to thin out the pack. Then, like pulling guards on a football team, they must wedge through small spaces between other riders, clearing paths through which their sprinters can dart. “The thing that you need to do most is get the sprinter as close as possible without being boxed in,” said Mark Renshaw, an Australian rider with Belkin who skipped the Tour this year because of an injury. “You want to make sure he has clean air in front of him.” Image Matteo Trentin, an Italian lead-out rider who works for Mark Cavendish on the Omega Pharma-Quick Step team. Credit Pascal Guyot/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images In this Tour, great lead-out efforts have led to victories by the Lotto-Belisol team for Greipel and the Argos-Shimano team for Marcel Kittel, who has won three stages this Tour, the most of any rider. And failed lead-outs have led to disaster. The most notable was when Cavendish’s lead rider left him too far from the finish of Stage 10 . When Cavendish made a frantic final surge alone, he bumped Kittel’s lead man, Tom Veelers. Veelers crashed, and Cavendish lost. In this game of nerves, trust is crucial, as the sprinter must have absolute faith that his lead-out rider is taking him down not only the fastest path, but the safest. The trust must work the other way as well. The lead-out rider must make sure the sprinter is staying inches off his back wheel. Even as he watches the road for bumps and turns, the lead-out rider will glance under his arms to check his sprinter’s location. All the while, the sprinter must fight for position so that no one separates him from his lead. Renshaw was for years Cavendish’s lead-out rider on the HTC-Highroad team, and together they formed one of the most successful sprint teams of recent years. “If you drop him off 200 meters away and he’s got nobody in front, then 9 out of 10 times, he should win,” Renshaw said of Cavendish. The payoff is crucial to sustaining team morale. When lead-out teams do their work well, their sprinters are expected to deliver victories — and lavish their teammates with praise (and perhaps presents and money). And if they fail, apologies are likely to follow. So it went for Cavendish after Stage 12 of this year’s Tour. As the race was bearing down on the finish, Steegmans powered Cavendish into first position with the line in sight. Yet to the surprise of the cycling world, Kittel inched past him for the victory. “I let them down,” Cavendish said of his teammates the next day. The best sprinting teams drill methodically to get their positioning just right. Those teams, including Lotto-Belisol, Argos-Shimano and Omega Pharma-Quick Step, are largely built around their fastest men. Cannondale is somewhat unusual. Though Sagan won the green jersey for sprinting last year and leads the competition again this year, he is not a pure sprinter, and his team does not always try to give him traditional lead-out trains. “If we put him in the right place eight kilometers out, he’ll latch on to others and find a way to win,” said Ted King, an American rider for Cannondale who had to quit the Tour after injuring his shoulder and then missing a time cut. “He’s savvy.” On Saturday, Trentin, who is in his second year as a professional, said he had learned a few things about sprinting from training with Cavendish. “The main thing we always say: We can wait the right moment,” he said. “And today I just wait the right moment.” | Tour de France;Biking;Mark Cavendish;Christopher Froome;Marcel Kittel |
ny0002716 | [
"sports",
"basketball"
] | 2013/03/13 | Wade Scores 23 Points to Lead Heat to 19th Straight Win | Dwyane Wade scored 23 points and the host Miami Heat extended their winning streak to 19 games, leading wire to wire in a 98-81 victory over the Atlanta Hawks on Tuesday night. LeBron James scored 15 for the Heat, who matched the fifth-longest streak in N.B.A. history. They will try for their 20th straight win Wednesday at Philadelphia, the start of a five-game trip. Only three teams have won at least 20 consecutive games in the same season: the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers (33), the 2007-8 Houston Rockets (22) and the 1970-71 Milwaukee Bucks (20). The Washington Capitols also won 20 straight, spanning the end of the 1947-48 season and the start of the 1948-49 campaign. Miami has the best overall record in the N.B.A. and leads the Eastern Conference race by nine and a half games over Indiana and the Knicks. TIMBERWOLVES 107, SPURS 83 Ricky Rubio had his first career triple-double with 21 points, 13 rebounds and 12 assists, leading host Minnesota past San Antonio. Rubio made 9 of 17 shots and grabbed his 10th rebound with 9 minutes 14 seconds left to play. The Spurs left Tim Duncan and Kawhi Leonard at home to rest after they throttled Oklahoma City on Monday night. CAVALIERS 95, WIZARDS 90 Dion Waiters scored 20 points and Alonzo Gee added 17 for host Cleveland. The Cavaliers played their first game since Kyrie Irving sprained his left shoulder Sunday. Irving, an All-Star guard, watched the game from the bench. He could miss the rest of this season. BOBCATS 100, CELTICS 74 Gerald Henderson had a career-high 35 points, and host Charlotte snapped a 10-game losing streak. Henderson knocked down all 12 of his free throws. The Bobcats (14-50) doubled last season’s win total. MAVERICKS 115, BUCKS 108 Vince Carter hit three key 3-pointers in the fourth quarter and scored 23 points off the bench as visiting Dallas won its fourth straight game. Dirk Nowitzki added 19 points for Dallas, which is three games out of the eighth spot in the Western Conference playoff race. | Basketball;Miami Heat;Atlanta Hawks;LeBron James |
ny0249112 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2011/05/12 | A Year After Israeli Raid, 2nd Flotilla to Set Sail for Gaza | Riding the ripples of the Golden Horn, the Mavi Marmara tugs at its moorings in the shipyard where it is being readied to head back into troubled waters. A flotilla of 15 ships carrying humanitarian aid and activists from 100 countries will sail for Gaza next month, in a second attempt to break the Israeli blockade of the Palestinian territory, organizers announced this week. Almost a year ago, Israeli naval commandos stormed a previous flotilla sailing to Gaza, killing nine pro-Palestinian activists on the Mavi Marmara, one of six ships in the fleet. The plan to send a new flotilla to Gaza raises the specter of a fresh confrontation between Turkey and Israel . “Freedom Flotilla II will leave during the third week of June, with ships departing from various European ports,” a coalition of 22 nongovernmental organizations said after a meeting in Paris on Monday. The Mavi Marmara, which was released by Israel in July, was towed back to Turkey and arrived in Istanbul to a hero’s welcome in December, after which it was taken in for repairs. Now tied up under the Istanbul skyline for some last preparations, the ship should be seaworthy again by the end of the month, its owners said. “The Mavi Marmara has become a symbol for the Gaza cause in the whole world,” Gulden Sonmez of the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, the Turkish nongovernmental organization that owns the ship, said in an interview this week. “So we are planning to set forth again with the same ship.” At dawn on May 31 last year, Ms. Sonmez stood on the observation deck of the Mavi Marmara, shouting orders as Israeli helicopters hovered overhead and commandos boarded the ship. Her colleague Cevdet Kiliclar, who managed the relief foundation’s Web site, was shot and killed while taking photographs “just three or four steps away from me,” she recounted. Now Ms. Sonmez, who is on the board of the foundation, plans to embark on the Mavi Marmara once again and will be one of 150 activists making the trip. Within 48 hours of application forms being posted on the foundation’s Web site last week, some 2,000 people had volunteered to partake in the journey, she said. Although Israel has warned that it will continue to enforce its Gaza blockade, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation does not expect another raid on its ship, Ms. Sonmez said. “I don’t think Israel will make the same mistake again,” she said. “I think Israel knows that it has isolated itself.” Not everyone agrees with her. “If the ship sails, it will be a disaster,” said Osman Bahadir Dincer, a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs at the International Strategic Research Organization in Ankara. “In this atmosphere in the Middle East, we do not need a provocation,” Mr. Dincer said by telephone this week. “This would absolutely be a provocation.” Relations between Turkey and Israel have not yet recovered from the crisis over the last flotilla. “We are waiting for our basic demands to be met, an apology and compensation,” a senior Turkish official, who asked not to be identified, said this week. “Since Turkey and Israel are not at war, the Israeli Defense Forces killed innocent civilian citizens of a friendly country.” A report by the U.N. Human Rights Council found that Israeli interception of the ship on the high seas was “clearly unlawful” and that its treatment of passengers “constituted a grave violation of human rights law and international humanitarian law.” But the report, published in September, also noted “a certain tension between the political objectives of the flotilla and its humanitarian objectives,” finding that the primary motive of the nongovernmental organizations was political. “We hope to be able to put this behind us and we have the will to do so,” the senior Turkish official said. “But Israel should move forward as well.” “Turkey would like to preserve its relations with Israel and once our expectations are met, we will start normalizing our relations,” he said. For the moment, however, there is little prospect of this, said Mr. Dincer, the Middle East expert. Elections on June 12 prevent Turkey from taking a step forward, while Israel has been hampered by its volatile government coalition, Mr. Dincer added. “Both sides cannot go forward,” he said. The flotilla crisis last year followed a series of conflicts that had soured relations between the two countries. Turkey and Israel had long prided themselves for being the only Western-style democracies in the Middle East. But ties began to unravel after the Israeli intervention in Gaza, when the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stormed off the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2009 after an angry exchange with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres. A year later, another quarrel erupted when an Israeli official humiliated the Turkish ambassador by seating him on a lower chair and dressing him down in front of TV cameras. These incidents are the symptoms, not the cause, of fundamental changes in the relationship between the two countries and within Turkey itself, Mr. Dincer said. “Turkey is no longer the country it was in the 1990s or the 2000s,” when relations with Israel were based on “elite relations” between the military and political leaderships, Mr. Dincer said. “Turkey is more democratic now, and society plays a much more important role in Turkish politics,” he said, arguing that it was no longer possible to maintain bilateral relations from the top down. “Instead, we must build relations between the two societies, involving civil society and the media and nongovernmental organizations.” Meanwhile, the Mavi Marmara must not sail, Mr. Dincer warned. “They have to be stopped, somehow, by someone,” he said about the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, asking that the group consider Turkish national interests. Another attack at sea would fuel attempts to “isolate Turkey from the West,” Mr. Dincer argued. The Turkish government, while at pains to distance itself from the flotilla, has made it clear that it will not intervene to bar the convoy from sailing. Israeli allegations that Turkey is behind the flotilla do not reflect the truth, the senior Turkish official said. But in a free society, he added, nongovernmental organizations can do as they like, within legal limits. “We believe that such initiatives as this convoy will cease only when Israel’s unlawful blockade on the Gaza Strip is lifted, as the situation in Gaza disturbs the conscience of all humanity,” the official said. “It doesn’t seem possible for Israel to reach lasting security as long as the unlawful blockade remains in place.” Turkey has warned Israel not to attack the ship again, the official said. “Last year, we had notified Israel a multitude of times that it should avoid by all means resorting to force, and act responsibly,” he said. “We are reiterating these warnings once again today.” | Gaza Strip;Turkey;Israel |
ny0223239 | [
"business",
"media"
] | 2010/11/19 | Time Warner Cable to Test Cheaper TV Package | In an apparent attempt to retain cable customers who are thinking of canceling, or to woo back people who have already canceled, Time Warner Cable will start a trial of a lower-cost cable subscription package next week in New York City . For roughly half the cost of Time Warner Cable’s current cable TV package, customers will receive ESPN News but not ESPN; TBS but not TNT; CNN but not Fox News or MSNBC. A market trial will begin in New York on Monday, a Time Warner Cable spokeswoman said, and in the company’s northeastern Ohio market on Dec. 15. The slimmed-down package, called TV Essentials, is an experiment for Time Warner Cable and for the television distribution business, which generally bundles as many channels as possible at the highest price possible. That strategy may be hitting a rough patch. Earlier this week, the research firm SNL Kagan said that the number of households subscribing to a cable or satellite service had dropped for the second consecutive quarter. The new package “isn’t for everyone, but we hope that some of those most hard-hit by the current economic conditions find it to be a helpful option,” Glenn Britt, Time Warner Cable chief executive, said in a news release on Thursday evening. The package will cost $39.95 a month in New York and $29.95 a month in Ohio. In New York the company’s most common package of cable channels row runs almost $75. Craig Moffett, a senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, said it was significant that the Walt Disney Company , the News Corporation and other channel owners were cooperating in the trial. “In agreeing to support this package at this price point, the media companies appear to be acknowledging the importance of lower-priced offerings,” he wrote in an analyst’s note Thursday. Notably, however, the lower-cost package will not be eligible for the so-called double- and triple-play discounts that Time Warner Cable sells to customers to sign up for television, Internet and phone service together. Effectively, Internet service will cost more for TV Essentials customers. Additionally, the lower-cost package will not include high-definition television channels. Still, Mr. Moffett called the package an “extraordinary compromise between content owners and distributors,” given that content owners have generally resisted any attempt to break up the bundle of channels. ESPN, which commands about $4 a month from most subscribers, making it the costliest single channel on cable, said Thursday in a statement that it expected the trial to have “no material impact to our business.” ESPN added, “Smaller experimental tiers have been tried before and resulted in very little traction.” | Cable television;Time Warner Cable |
ny0124980 | [
"business"
] | 2012/08/29 | Analysts Brace for Flood of Corporate Campaign Contributions | Way back in February of this year, more than two-thirds of Californians believed raising more money from tobacco companies to finance cancer research was a good idea. That was before industry money kicked in. In just over three months, opponents spent $41 million to defeat the initiative — a proposition to levy an extra $1 on the sale of a pack of cigarettes — five times what its supporters spent. On June 5, it was defeated by 50.2 percent to 49.8 percent. Similar forces in the next couple of months could shape the November elections. All the funds raised for the presidential and Congressional races so far pale in comparison to the money expected to rush in after the party conventions this week and next. This is the first presidential election since the Supreme Court ’s decision in the Citizens United case removed the last barriers to campaign spending by corporations and other groups. Analysts are bracing for a tidal wave of money from rich individuals, companies and labor unions that could alter the political landscape and transform American democracy. Voters have always worried about the role of corporate money in election campaigns. Surprisingly perhaps, there hasn’t really been that much. Gordon Tullock, one of the first social scientists to study the effects of corporate money in politics, remarked 40 years ago that it was a mystery that companies didn’t spend much more given the huge potential return of swaying legislators’ votes. Ten years ago, Stephen Ansolabehere, John M. de Figueiredo, and James M. Snyder from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology picked up the theme with a study called “Why Is There So Little Money in U.S. Politics?” They noted that campaign spending over the last 100 years had remained stagnant and perhaps even declined as a share of the nation’s gross domestic product. In 2000, the average contribution to a legislator by political action committees associated with unions, companies or industry groups was only $1,700, they found. This was way below the $10,000 legal ceiling and a trivial amount considering the goodies at stake. In 2000 the military procurement budget was $134 billion. Yet military contractors and their employees contributed less than $25 million to the campaigns of 1998 and 2000. “The discrepancy between the value of policy and the amounts contributed strains basic economic intuitions,” Mr. Ansolabehere and his colleagues wrote. “Given the value of policy at stake, firms and other interest groups should give more.” Even the nearly $4 billion in campaign spending in 2010 pales against the government’s $1 trillion in discretionary spending. And corporate money made only a small percentage of the total. It may seem unbelievable that there has been “too little” corporate money in politics. But it makes some sense. Corporations don’t give more money because most of the time it isn’t really that effective in producing the outcomes they desire. Some elections — for example, the mayoral race in New York — seem to have been decided by a magnate’s or a corporation’s overwhelming campaign spending. Pressure from Wall Street lobby groups almost certainly contributed to the demise of the Glass-Steagall Act , which had barred banks from engaging in some businesses. But, over all, there is little evidence that money is effective at swaying legislation or improving the corporate bottom line. One study found that changes in campaign contribution laws from 1971 through 2002 had no impact on the stock price of companies that were heavily engaged in campaign spending. On the other hand, playing politics can hurt a company’s brand. The chief executive of Target had to apologize two years ago when the company’s contribution to the campaign of Tom Emmer, the Republican candidate in Minnesota’s race for governor and a staunch opponent of gay marriage, led to threats of a boycott of its stores. Campaign contributions can affect the priorities of elected officials, opening the door for interest group lobbyists. Studies have found that companies that lobby intensely are more profitable, on average, than those that don’t. Still, the evidence suggests most companies do not get any return from their lobbying expenditures. And though businesses have historically spent much more lobbying legislators than on campaign contributions, lobbying expenditures also are small compared with the benefits they could reap. Richard Hall of the University of Michigan notes that interest groups dedicate most of their campaign contributions and lobbying efforts to legislators they already agree with, helping them make their case, and spend little time trying to persuade opponents. And big donors don’t have exclusive access to legislators, Mr. Hall found. Legislators also grant access to like-minded interest groups with little money to give. In a way, this narrative may make more sense than the persistent fear that interest groups are shaping policy by getting their allies elected and telling them what to do. Money can change the fate of a ballot initiative, such as California’s Proposition 29 to place a tax on tobacco sales, because voters have little knowledge of the issue. But most Americans voters start with an opinion about the candidates in a race, especially of incumbents. It is expensive to sway their votes. Studying Congressional races from 1972 to 1990, Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago concluded that campaign finance had a tiny effect : an extra $175,000 in campaign spending, in today’s money, would buy only a third of a percentage point of the final vote. Mr. Ansolabehere, now at Harvard, and Mr. Snyder reached similar conclusions: a candidate would have to double campaign spending to increase his share of the vote by four percentage points. And this is only if his rival didn’t respond by spending more, too. For the typical incumbent in the House, that would mean increasing spending to $1.5 million from $750,000. The limited impact of money on election outcomes or legislation raises two questions, of course: why do politicians spend such time and effort raising money? And why do companies make donations at all? Maybe politicians fear facing a lopsided race if they disarm unilaterally. Legislators may be able to rustle up corporate contributions without changing legislation simply by hinting at irksome new laws or regulations if the money is not forthcoming. Still, it provides a better understanding of the role of money in politics. Money doesn’t win elections, at least not consistently. And elected officials are unlikely to sell their votes to interest groups that can’t guarantee their re-election. The question is whether this analysis will hold in the new age of easy money. Or whether money will have the same sway in national politics as it did with the tobacco tax proposition in California. Legal and regulatory changes dating to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law of 2002 have eased the way for independent players to support or attack a candidate with their money. Companies have not made big contributions to “ super PACs ” as allowed by Citizens United, perhaps because of concerns about a possible reaction against their brands. But we can’t know how much they are spending: they can give anonymously to so-called 501(c) nonprofits, which are becoming prominent players in the campaign. The flow of money into politics is rising, already bucking its 100-year trend: campaign spending for the 2008 election amounted to 0.037 percent of the nation’s output, up from 0.031 percent in 2000. These new resources could transform elections into something akin to ballot initiatives, where money has a proven track record in molding the outcome. Until fairly recently, campaign spending in national elections was rather evenly matched. Yet spending by interest groups could easily change that. In 2008 Barack Obama vastly outspent John McCain by refusing federal financing for the first time. Lopsided elections could become the norm when, say, Sheldon Adelson, Philip Morris or the American Federation of Teachers can step in and upset the balance. A few years ago, West Virginia gave us a taste of what national politics could look like once corporations really take an interest in deploying their cash. In 2002, a jury in West Virginia ordered the AT Massey Coal Company to pay out $50 million to plaintiffs. During the appeals process, Massey’s chief executive at the time, Don Blankenship, got involved in the campaign to unseat a justice on the state’s highest court — spending $3 million of his own money to support an ally, Brent Benjamin. Of course, he won. When Massey’s appeal was heard in 2007 and again in 2008, Justice Benjamin joined 3-2 majorities to overturn the award. The United States Supreme Court saved West Virginia from this apparent purchase of justice — but with only a 5-4 majority and on narrow grounds. Justice Benjamin, it ruled, should have recused himself to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. On the broader issue, the attempt to buy power, the court passed. It will be interesting to see corporate money play out on the national stage. Worried about how the next administration will impose new financial regulations , Wall Street would love to do for Mitt Romney and Congressional Republicans what Mr. Blankenship did for Justice Benjamin. With so many channels to deploy their money, maybe they can. | Campaign Finance;Presidential Election of 2012;Political Action Committees;Citizens United;Supreme Court;Citizens United v Federal Election Commission (Supreme Court Decision);Corporations;United States;Elections |
ny0036680 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2014/03/07 | Branded Saloon Offers Bits of Texas and Bytes of Music | The Miser can’t decide whether 21st-century Brooklyn’s peculiar predilection for mastering “country” traditions (the old-time Appalachian music preserved at the Jalopy Theater and the Texas tastes of the Hill Country franchise, for example) is just baffling or makes perfect sense. Branded Saloon appears to have struck an intriguing balance between the chaotic cityscape that encloses us and the pastoral pleasures of the great wide open. On the surface, this Western-style outpost on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights looks like yet another homage. Inside, however, an admirably wide spectrum of culture can be encountered — mostly free — over a single weekend, a mix much more in line with the kind of diversity New Yorkers expect. On Friday, the focus is on a classic feature of saloon culture, a Poker Night (though there is no money involved) that begins at 8. Beer partisans are also encouraged to take part in an evening-long free tasting sponsored by the Samuel Adams brewery. On Saturday, the outfit kick.snare presents another installment of its electronic music series in the chiptune genre — tracks inspired by the blips and clicks of vintage video and computer games — with Adam Gets Awesome, Zafq! and Trey Frey, and eight-bit visual accompaniment provided by Batsly Adams. On Sunday, you can catch a double bill of young jazz artists. At 7 p.m., the saxophonist Philipp Gerschlauer will blend an interest in microtones with traditional forms. He will be followed by another saxophonist, Michael Sachs , leading his group at 8. The Miser also notes that Branded’s food menu includes a highly economical $5 grilled cheese sandwich (with cheddar and Gouda, no less) and playfully caters to tastes running from an endive and arugula salad to Frito pie. ( Friday, 4 p.m. to 4 a.m.; Saturday, noon to 4 a.m.; Sunday, noon to 2 a.m. ; 603 Vanderbilt Avenue, at Bergen Street, Prospect Heights; 718-484-8704, brandedsaloon.com.) A DIGITAL CRITIC SPEAKS Jaron Lanier, the computer-science pioneer and critic of digital culture, is both a musician and a former employee of the vintage video game company Atari, so you might reasonably expect him to be perfectly at home with the lo-res aesthetics of chiptune. But that would be entirely too predictable for Mr. Lanier, whose performing and composing over the last few decades have primarily involved his world-class collection of exotic acoustic instruments from around the world. That kind of paradox has made Mr. Lanier’s a notable voice in the debate over the proper relationship between human beings and their new digital tools, some of which he helped develop. On Friday night, Mr. Lanier will give a free public lecture at Cooper Union, drawing on his recent book, “ Who Owns the Future? ” Expect a sharp critique of social media and the corporations who control them, and a vision for circumventing that control to gain some measure of economic equality. (Friday, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.; 7 East Seventh Street, East Village; 212-353-4100, cooper.edu.) | Music;Cooper Union;Jaron Lanier;Branded Saloon Brooklyn |
ny0190569 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2009/05/01 | Rodriguez Keeps His Focus on Baseball | TAMPA, Fla. — Alex Rodriguez stayed on script Thursday, addressing new allegations of steroid use as though it was just another part of his rehabilitation from hip surgery. “I’m not going there,” he said four times in response to questions about a report that he used performance-enhancing drugs after 2003. Rodriguez did not seem too concerned that he might be forced to confront the issue again, this time in regard to steroid use as a Yankee , which he has denied. “I’m in a good place,” Rodriguez said when asked if these new allegations might cloud his return to the team. “I think, more importantly, physically I’m getting better every day. We’ve had a great week here. We’ve worked extremely hard and I’m just very anxious to do what God put me on this Earth to do, and that’s to play baseball.” He seemed ready for his cue while meeting with a handful of reporters after Thursday’s workout. He quickly tried to defuse the first question about the new steroid allegations, saying: “I’m not going there. I’m just so excited about being back on the field, playing baseball, and hopefully coming back and helping my team win some more games.” Rodriguez’s stance and swing looked mechanical as he searched for a groove during eight at-bats. He went 1 for 6 with two walks. He struck out swinging in his first plate appearance and later struck out looking, before cracking a long home run to left center field in his sixth try. Rodriguez also had two fly outs and a ground out. “It feels good to be in the box and see some professional pitching,” he said. “It’s the first day. It feels good to actually execute the swing and track the pitches. I think I saw about 30 pitches today, and that felt pretty good. It’s a first step, tomorrow’s another.” Medically, Rodriguez says he is fine and expects to meet the May 15 target date to rejoin the Yankees . He has yet to run the bases at full speed and with the proper techniques, and he said that sliding would be the last hurdle to clear. “Sliding is probably the thing I have the most reservations about because you have to get on your hip and bounce on it a little bit,” he said. “But everything seems like we’re on schedule.” Rodriguez said he had watched every pitch of Yankees games and could not wait to make his first appearance at the new Yankee Stadium. “It’s hard to watch, because I want to be playing,” he said. “I just want to get out there and try to help them a little bit.” | Steroids;Rodriguez Alex;Baseball;New York Yankees |
ny0188184 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2009/04/01 | On Staten Island, a Jewish Cemetery Where All Are Equals in Death | Two shovels were planted in the mound next to the open mouth of the grave. “For those of you who don’t know about this,” said the rabbi, Shmuel Plafker, “let me show you.” He lifted the first pile of dirt with the back of the shovel. “To symbolize that we really don’t want to do this,” Rabbi Plafker said. It was a perfect early spring day: acres of blue sky, the lightest of breezes moving past the graves of Mount Richmond Cemetery on Staten Island. Here, 55,000 Jews are buried in plots owned by the Hebrew Free Burial Association . These are the graves of the poor, which, under Judaic law, do not differ from those of the rich. The ritual of burial is a rope across time: families who lived a century ago at 108 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side — now known as the Tenement Museum — are buried at Mount Richmond. The maternal grandparents of Mel Brooks are down one row. In another corner are 23 of the girls and boys who were killed in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in 1911. On Tuesday afternoon, in Section 35, it was the time to lay Jeffrey Lynn Schneider to rest, in a box of raw pine, the lid barely held on with three wooden pegs. As the rabbi worked, a man named Stanley Weinstein, a cousin of Mr. Schneider’s, picked up another shovel and pushed earth into the hole. A spray of cousins and friends stood around the grave, a dozen or so, waiting their turn. After a minute of work, Mr. Weinstein drove the shovel back into the mound. “We don’t hand it off to the next person, to show that we don’t want to pass on death,” Rabbi Plafker said. It was the rabbi’s third funeral of the day. At the first two, for elderly people, he and three men who work in the cemetery were the only people at the graveside. The rabbi said the prayers; the men performed the ritual with the shovels. “We are the only friends all the time for poor people,” said Joe Shalem, the superintendent of the cemetery, nodding to the two gravediggers, Cesar Bustamante and Wilson Montes Deoca. The free burial society began in 1888, after the first waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe. The society bought the 23 acres on Staten Island and began burials at Mount Richmond in March 1909. The aim is to provide traditional Jewish burials to people who cannot afford them, said Amy Koplow, the society’s executive director. The thumps hitting the pine box became more muffled as the mourners piled dirt upon dirt. The first person of Creation, Rabbi Plafker said, was Adam, whose name comes from the Hebrew word “adamah,” meaning the ground. Thus, he said, the body is returned to the earth as it came, washed and wrapped in a shroud with no pockets. Mr. Schneider was 54. He grew up on East 17th Street in Midwood, Brooklyn, a bright boy who went to a yeshiva and then Stuyvesant High School, mastering chess and backgammon. “He would prefer to read than go out to a restaurant,” said Carol Metrick, a cousin who as a child lived in the same house as Mr. Schneider. He went to the University of Arizona but gave it up after a freak snowstorm. For a while, he worked on the crews of television shows. He ran a car service. He owned homes in Rockland County, but sold them under financial pressure. He had girlfriends but never married, Ms. Metrick said, and seemed easygoing at family gatherings. Physical ailments led to a hermetic existence, the family said. “He had disk problems of some sort, which isolated him from a lot of things,” Mr. Weinstein said. “I’d call him on the holidays, I’d offer to take him out to dinner. He said he couldn’t because his back hurt.” His parents died nine years ago. He moved back to Midwood around 2004, with no apparent source of income. By February, he faced a Housing Court judgment of $24,000, Mr. Weinstein said, and told a friend he was going upstate. Instead, he drove back to 17th Street, parked across the street from his boyhood home, got in the back seat under a blanket, and shot himself in the head. His sister tried to track him down and Mr. Weinstein filed a missing person’s report. Six weeks of parking tickets were stuck on the windshield when his body was found last Thursday. The rabbi recited a prayer. The family members, clasping each other, walked to the cars. Mr. Shalem and his gravediggers filled the hole, then raked the ground to smooth it. | Jews and Judaism;Funerals;Cemeteries;Staten Island (NYC);Death and Dying |
ny0181765 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2007/12/04 | New Hampshire: Bail Set in Clinton Standoff | A man accused of taking hostages at Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton ’s presidential campaign office in Rochester was arraigned on six felony charges, including kidnapping and criminal threatening. The man, Leeland Eisenberg of Somersworth, was ordered held on $500,000 cash bail by a Rochester District Court judge. Mr. Eisenberg walked into the office Friday, claimed he had a bomb and took people hostage. | Clinton Hillary Rodham;Hostages;New Hampshire;Presidential Election of 2008 |
ny0210987 | [
"technology",
"personaltech"
] | 2017/01/20 | How Your Phone Knows Where You Have Been | Q. Is it true my phone keeps a map that tracks my whereabouts? Why, and if so, where can I see it? A. If you have the GPS feature (also know as location services) enabled on your phone and have not changed any default settings, the device may contain a log of the places you have been or frequently visit. Apple and Google have both described some of the ways they use the information, which is often used for suggesting businesses nearby. Google’s site says using the data lets you “see local recommendations based on places you have visited with signed-in devices, or see traffic predictions for your daily commute.” Like Google’s Android system and apps, apps on Apple’s iOS system use your location for providing relevant weather reports, map directions and photo geo-tagging. (Google has apps for iOS that can also store information about your travels.) Image When Google stores your location history, you can go into the Timeline page in your account settings and see where you were on certain days. Credit The New York Times If you have not disabled the GPS function on your phone and are curious to see if the device has been keeping a log of your locations, visit your account settings. On the iPhone, go to the home screen, open the Settings app and select Privacy. On the Privacy screen, tap Location Services, scroll down the list of apps and choose System Services. At the bottom of the System Services screen, choose Frequent Locations to see a list of your travels, and tap a location to see a map. If you have been using the Google Maps app on Android or iOS, log into your Google account and visit your Location History page; you can also get to the settings from the Activity Controls page for your Google account. Once there, you should see a map with at least a few frequent locations marked. Use the calendar icon or date menus to see your location information on selected days. Apple’s site has a page on using the iOS Location Services feature and controlling which apps can use that data. Google’s site has information about managing your location history in Android and iOS and how you can delete all or some of the places from your recorded timeline. | Mobile Apps;Map;GPS;Android;Smartphone;Privacy |
ny0016562 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2013/10/30 | As Power Line Grows, So Does Fight Between Ancient and Modern Korea | MIRYANG, South Korea — The traditional farming villages within Miryang city, like so many in South Korea, are nestled against forested mountains. Rice paddies spill out into the valley, and persimmon and apple orchards line the roads. Wooden farmhouses with their tile roofs were replaced long ago with concrete homes, but the rituals of a more ancient Korea remain. The farmers plan their lives around the growing seasons, and when they die, they are buried in plots that dot the mountainsides. Now, a more modern Korea — in the form of imposing electrical power lines — is encroaching on the villages, including their burial grounds. The villages lie in the path of a major transmission route expected to distribute nuclear-generated electricity. Already towers are built along the spines of some nearby mountains, and 50 more are scheduled to be built in Miryang, some of them in the mountains. But not if some of the villagers have anything to say about it. For the past two years, the villagers have staged protests that included a rare self-immolation, demonstrations in Seoul and a two-year sleep-in by older women who have built tents on the tops of mountains on the plots the utility company cleared for some of the towers. The women take breaks to go back to their homes, but most of the women sleep there in rotations, warmed in the winter by kerosene heaters. They fly Korean flags from their plastic-covered shelters. “My family has lived here for 500 years, and all our ancestors are buried in these mountains,” said Sohn Hee-kyong, a 78-year-old rice farmer whose husband’s grave is nearby and who stays in the encampment. “I can’t let those steel monstrosities pass over here. Over my dead body.” Image Power lines from the Gori nuclear complex are being built. Credit The New York Times The villagers’ standoff against the $166 billion state utility, the Korea Electric Power Corporation, or Kepco, has become a closely watched national news story; some news media report it in forensic detail, marking each time the company manages to place another tower — usually after it has paid enough compensation to nearby property owners to win their support. The story has grabbed headlines not only because it is a potent symbol of South Korea’s perennial struggle to reconcile its traditions with its hard-charging modern incarnation, but also because of a growing battle in South Korea over nuclear power. Support for nuclear power has been waning since the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan and after a series of scandals in South Korea revealed that plants nationwide included many parts whose safety test results were faked. The villagers have become increasingly desperate to stop the transmission project. But the scandals have also made Kepco a bit desperate to move the project along. The nuclear plant that is expected to be hooked up to the new transmission line is an important test case for the now-sullied industry and the government, which have been counting on making nuclear plants a lucrative export. Two of the reactors at the plant are of a model that South Korea hopes will be a big seller. Miryang is 174 miles southeast of Seoul, and a world apart. Compared with Seoul’s bustle, the villages that together house about 110,000 people are sleepy. Many of the young people have moved to South Korea’s increasingly wealthy cities. Some roads are so quiet that villagers dry their grains on them after the harvest. Their fight with the national utility began in 2007, when Kepco began building a 56-mile overhead power line to be strung from 161 towers linking Gori, one of South Korea’s largest nuclear complexes, in an area straddling the border between Busan and Ulsan in the southeast, to a substation to the northwest. At first, people here feared perceived health threats from the lines, expected to carry 765,000 volts, and sharp drops in real estate prices as the massive towers dotted mainly pristine mountains or passed near their villages. (Since farmers sometimes borrow against their homes and rice paddies to get loans they pay back after harvests, the value of their land is especially important.) Image A gate was locked at a transmission tower site. Credit Woohae Cho for The New York Times They also worried about their burial sites; as in much of rural South Korea, worshiping ancestors is common here and protecting graves from anything deemed an impurity is a paramount duty for the living. The fight intensified last year, when a 74-year-old farmer named Lee Chi-woo poured gasoline on his body and set himself on fire in Bora, one of the Miryang villages. Earlier that day, Kepco workers had begun building a tower on a rice paddy owned by Mr. Lee and his brothers while security guards pushed the protesting brothers off the site, confiscated against their will and at prices much lower than they had sought. With Mr. Lee’s suicide, more older villagers took to the hills, building huts at sites where Kepco planned to build the transmission towers, some as tall as 40-story buildings. Antinuclear activists poured into the villages by the busload, to support the villages and to bolster their own cause. As some people and villages in Miryang accepted Kepco’s compensation packages, resentment grew on both sides. Kepco and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said the older protesters were impeding an important national project. Pro-government residents put up roadside banners denouncing outsiders for bringing antinuclear activism here and urging the villagers to “cooperate with the management of businesses and the state.” Competing banners scream “No to nuclear power!” Rival neighbors within villages have stopped talking to one another, and some have had shoving matches that led to lawsuits. About a dozen of the Miryang villages are now the last holdouts. Of the 56-mile transmission line, Kepco has completed all but the 19-mile section that is supposed to pass through the villages and the nearby mountains. Image Sohn Hee-kyong, 78, second from left, joined the protests. Credit Woohae Cho for The New York Times During months of unsuccessful negotiations this year, villagers demanded that Kepco reroute the power line, bury it underground or lower the voltage of electricity it is expected to carry. The utility called the alternatives unfeasible and resumed construction in early October, starting with villages where it had earlier reached deals with residents. Some Miryang residents have tried to block the trucks rumbling up nearby mountains to lay concrete for more towers, but the police have held the people back. Frustrated old women now resort to waving their canes at the passing trucks and launching tirades against police officers their grandchildren’s age. Some have tried to throw themselves in front of the trucks. Down the mountain from Ms. Sohn’s tent camp, where the forest has turned into an autumn tapestry, male villagers have begun standing guard. (Ms. Sohn, one of the women who lives at the encampment, calls the men, in their 60s, the “young ones.”) On a recent day, the men stood behind ropes tied across the path leading to the outpost, smoking cigarettes and watching for construction workers they feared would come at any time. Three nooses dangled from nearby pine trees. “To hang them or be hanged,” the men said. The women have also taken a fatalistic turn, building trenches in front of their tents they say will serve as their own grave sites if the authorities try to remove them. Ms. Sohn said she recently tried to prepare her children for the worst. “When they called me the other day, I said, ‘I will die fighting,' ” she said. “That way, I would be less ashamed when I met my dead ancestors.” | Electric power;Nuclear energy;South Korea;Agriculture;Korea Electric Power |
ny0177492 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2007/09/19 | Focus on Rust at New Jersey A-Plant as Engineer Casts Doubt on Barrier’s Safety | As the federal government decides whether to extend the license of the country’s oldest nuclear plant, near Toms River, N.J., attention has narrowed to the huge steel radiation barrier that surrounds its nuclear reactor. While there is no dispute that the radiation barrier at the Oyster Creek plant has been severely damaged by rust, the plant’s owner and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have contended that it is strong enough to last another 20 years. But last month, an engineer from the commission told a panel reviewing the relicensing application that the barrier had rusted so badly that it no longer met the national engineering code. The testimony was a rare instance in which the agency staff — which supports extending the license — concluded that the plant did not meet an engineering standard. And although the federal officials say the barrier remains strong enough to allow for the license extension, opponents insist that failure to meet the code of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers is a serious lapse. “They are gambling with safety,” said Paul Gunter, of the advocacy group Beyond Nuclear. The license to operate the Oyster Creek plant, which opened in 1969 and supplies about 7 percent of the electric power in New Jersey , is set to expire in two years. The plant’s owner, AmerGen Energy Company, has applied to extend the license for 20 years, and the battle over the extension has become the most bitter in the history of the nuclear industry. AmerGen says the barrier meets the engineering standards required by federal law. Despite the conclusion of the engineer, Mark Hartzman, about the rusting, the staff of the regulatory commission has recommended approval of the extension. The decision now rests with the federal Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, which has scheduled hearings for this month. Complicating the issue, the regulatory agency submitted an addendum to Dr. Hartzman’s testimony, saying he had based his calculations on figures that its own officials and AmerGen have disputed. Dr. Hartzman did not respond to a request for comment, and the commission declined to answer questions about his testimony and why the N.R.C. based its calculations on the opponents’ analysis, with which it disagrees. The metal barrier is designed to trap radioactive material in the event of a nuclear accident. Over the years, water has poured over the barrier when workers refueled the reactor, and parts of it have rusted. In some spots, about half of the metal has been lost. Richard Webster, a lawyer representing opponents of the relicensing, said the conclusion that the shield no longer met the engineering code raised questions about the plant’s ability to operate safely. In legal papers, he has argued that the plant’s continued operation has been based on meeting the code. Diane Screnci, a spokeswoman for the commission, agreed that the owners of Oyster Creek promised to meet the engineering code when the plant was first licensed in 1969, although she said in a recent e-mail message that meeting the code was not required to keep it operating. In addition, Ms. Screnci said, the commission recently granted an exception to the code for Oyster Creek because the shield was strong enough despite the corrosion. But David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group, said the engineering code, developed after careful study, provided a baseline of safety for the country’s 104 nuclear plants. He said it was highly unusual, if not unprecedented, for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to grant a waiver exempting a nuclear plant from an engineering code without a formal review by the commission. AmerGen officials said the argument was beside the point. Leslie Cifelli, a spokeswoman for the company, said the plant did not require a waiver because the barrier met the code. Mr. Webster, the lawyer for the opponents, said that when the plant opened, the barrier was nearly twice as strong as the code required. “It is inevitable that over time you lose some margin, but here the loss has been extreme,” said Mr. Webster, who works at the Rutgers Environmental Law Clinic. Nearly everything needed to operate the reactor, from pipes supplying water to systems for managing the nuclear reaction, passes through the steel barrier. Opponents say any kind of buckling could break these critical systems and cause operators to lose control of the reactor. AmerGen and the commission say that the opponents’ concerns are unjustified and that there is enough metal left in the steel barrier to protect the reactor even under the most stressful conditions. “Oyster Creek can run safely and reliably for another 20 years,” Ms. Cifelli said. Rust was first detected on the barrier in the 1980s, and the N.R.C. told the owner at the time, GPU Nuclear, that it had to maintain a strict inspection program to continue operating. After AmerGen bought Oyster Creek and announced its intention to extend the nuclear plant’s license in 2005, opponents raised the question of corrosion. The most recent measurements of the barrier, made in the fall of 2006, were separately analyzed by two experts: Rudolf Hausler, for the opponents; and Peter Tamburro, for AmerGen, Mr. Webster said. When the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board asked the commission for an estimate of the barrier’s strength last month, Dr. Hartzman testified that the barrier’s estimated strength in a section surrounded by a sand bed was slightly below the engineering code’s requirement. But Dr. Hartzman noted that “the staff believes that the sand bed shell, with the current or potential corrosion, would not be susceptible to buckling.” | Atomic Energy;New Jersey |
ny0264982 | [
"world",
"americas"
] | 2011/12/22 | Mexico: Veracruz Police Force Disbanded | The police force in the port city of Veracruz was dissolved on Wednesday, and Mexican officials sent the navy in to patrol. The Veracruz State government said the decision was part of an effort to root out police corruption and start over in the state’s largest city. A state spokeswoman, Gina Dominguez, said 800 police officers and 300 administrative employees were laid off. She told reporters that the former officers could apply for jobs in a state police force but would have to meet stricter standards. Thirty-five bodies were dumped in Veracruz in one of the worst gang attacks of Mexico’s drug war . The Mexican Army has taken over police operations several times, notably in the border city of Ciudad Juárez. But Veracruz is the first state to disband a large police department and use marines for law enforcement. | Corruption (Institutional);Police Brutality and Misconduct;Veracruz (Mexico);Drug Abuse and Traffic |
ny0077355 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2015/05/08 | 3 Ways to Be a Socially Conscious Nail Salon Customer | So what salon should you go to? It is a question that has come up often over the course of The New York Times’s investigation of New York City’s nail salons . The answer is challenging. In interviews with more than 125 manicurists across the New York region, who have worked, all told, in over 300 nail shops, only three spoke of salons that appeared to obey the letter of the law when it comes to compensation — doing things like paying minimum wage, keeping accurate hourly records and paying overtime. So what can you do? Interview your manicurist . Sitting across from a nail worker provides an opportunity for dialogue, a chance to ask how much the person doing your nails is paid, or if the worker was made to pay a fee to the employer to start working. Employers in New York are permitted to pay a worker who regularly receives tips slightly less than the state’s $8.75 hourly minimum wage, based on a complex calculation of how much the worker is making in tips. If your manicurist is being paid significantly less, the state Department of Labor runs a hotline where tips on suspected wage theft and other violations can be called in anonymously. The number is 1-888-469-7365. Look around . At one shop in SoHo, manicurists do something unusual when they walk in the door: They punch in with a timecard at a machine near the front desk. Such a device, which workers use to clock in and clock out, suggests that their work hours are being tabulated accurately by their employer, and that they are being paid overtime if necessary. But it is not a guarantee. Salons frequently keep a second set of books, according to salon owners, which lists people they are paying under the table. Pay more . The lower the price of the manicure, the greater the chance the workers are being deprived of wages they are due, according to Nicole Hallett, a lecturer at Yale Law School who has worked on nail salon wage cases. “We, as consumers, expect to have low prices and to be able to go to nail salons often, but the more prices are pushed down, the more employers are cutting costs,” Ms. Hallett said. “They’re cutting costs somewhere, and in many cases it’s coming out of the pockets of the workers themselves.” For customers, Ms. Hallett said, “When they see a really low price to get a manicure or a pedicure, I would think twice about it.” What about simply tipping more? This is also a fraught question. Manicurists, of course, depend upon tips, but they say their gratuities are frequently skimmed, or particularly if they are put on a credit card, never delivered. The impulse to make up the deficit in a worker’s pay with more in tips may be a noble one, according to advocates, but does little to solve the root problem, and in fact may perpetuate it. Owners often believe that the tips workers receive mean they do not have to pay as much in wages. | Beauty salon;Jobs;NYC;Wages and salaries;Nails |
ny0186087 | [
"sports",
"ncaabasketball"
] | 2009/03/24 | For Duke’s Gerald Henderson, Family History in Boston | Twenty-five years after Gerald Henderson stole the ball, his son of the same name is going to Boston, scene of the crime. “I wish it were another city, to be honest,” Henderson the elder said. “I think there will be a lot of people up there reminding him of that, especially the press. But this is his time now, and he needs to get his mind to that.” Gerald the younger , Duke ’s leading man, has a Round-of-16 date with Villanova in the N.C.A.A. tournament Thursday night. The old hothouse his father once roamed is long gone, and the new arena has a corporate name attached, but North Station remains Boston’s basketball hub, and townsfolk still drop the r when they refer to the Garden. After a two-decade-plus wait, the Celtics are the defending N.B.A. champions, the ghosts again prey on opponents, and the memories — not all pleasant ones for Gerald the elder — will be difficult to dismiss when he steps onto Causeway Street, into an arena with the mailing address of 100 Legends Way. His contribution to the legend specifically known as Larry was never quite treated with the reverence it deserved, though as Henderson said Monday in a telephone interview, “It was one of the most important plays in Celtics lore, no matter which way you look at it.” Go back to May 31, 1984, Game 2 of the N.B.A. finals, the Celtics facing the unthinkable prospect of losing the first two games at home to Magic Johnson and the Lakers. With 18 seconds left in the fourth quarter, the Lakers had a 2-point lead and the ball in the backcourt. Henderson is a little fuzzy on whom he was supposed to guard, on what exactly came next, but he will never forget James Worthy, after taking a pass from Magic, floating one to the right side, toward Byron Scott. For years, Scott would rue his rookie mistake of not moving to the ball, of letting it come to him. Henderson seized his parquet moment, angling in for the interception, deflecting the ball with his left hand, soaring to the basket to lay it in . Resuscitated, the Celtics won in overtime, 124-121. The series would end with Magic overdribbling the Lakers into a Game 7 defeat in Boston, where Bird’s triumph over Johnson was illuminated like a darkened Garden full of victory cigars. Boston enjoyed it while it could. The next year, the Lakers celebrated a championship on the Celtics’ home court. Magic again trumped Larry in 1987. Final score in four championship matchups, including their 1979 N.C.A.A. title game in Salt Lake City : Magic 3, Larry 1. More than most, Bird would recognize how much he owed that precious one to Henderson, and he went out of his way to say so when the banner was raised the next fall. By then, Henderson had been edited out of the ceremony, off the roster, deviously traded by Red Auerbach during the preseason after re-signing with the Celtics as a restricted free agent. It was a low negotiating blow, the opportunist in Auerbach striking to make room in the starting lineup for Danny Ainge. Henderson, a 6-foot-2 point guard plucked from the Continental Basketball Association in 1979, was banished to Seattle for a first-round draft choice. The maneuver seemed like another Auerbachian stroke of genius when the Sonics fell apart and the Celtics had the second pick in the 1986 draft. But it was a rookie class remembered largely for drug abuse. Chris Washburn, Roy Tarpley and William Bedford struggled with cocaine. Len Bias , Boston’s pick, partied with the powder, went into cardiac arrest and died hours after being introduced as the next Celtics link on the championship chain. The personal loss to a family was unspeakably tragic, but for some, the effect on the Celtics was seen as an intervention from an unhappy higher authority. Cedric Maxwell, who was on the floor with Henderson that night and was sent packing by Auerbach, years ago said: “I think God was saying, You didn’t give the man any credit? O.K., I’m telling you from upstairs that I don’t like what you did.” Whatever one’s historical perspective, three defensive plays transcend the Celtics’ illustrious history. John Havlicek stole the ball (in Game 7 of the 1965 Eastern Conference finals against Philadelphia). Bird swiped Isiah Thomas’s inbounds pass (to hijack Game 5 of the 1987 conference finals against Detroit). Henderson’s steal, the least celebrated, probably had the most impact. Havlicek’s play merely preserved a 1-point lead. Bird’s steal didn’t lead to a title. Henderson’s saved the most important series of the Bird era. Asked how much Gerald the younger knows about his play, Henderson said: “He wasn’t born then, but he’s seen it plenty. I have it at home. It’s on YouTube. He’s aware.” The son, who bears a striking facial resemblance to his father, goes to Boston in the 25th anniversary year. Maybe he celebrates by stealing the show. | NCAA Basketball Tournament (Men);Duke University;Basketball;College Athletics;Athletics and Sports;Henderson Gerald;Bird Larry;Auerbach Red;Boston Celtics |
ny0059032 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2014/08/29 | With His Parents’ Home at Risk, Atlantic City Piano Man Prepares for a Fight | ATLANTIC CITY — Anyone who has played Monopoly knows that Oriental Avenue is in a low-rent neighborhood of this surf-and-slots town, whose street names were borrowed in the 1930s by the makers of the game. So it was no surprise two years ago when New Jersey’s casino development authority chose the house at 311 Oriental Avenue as one of the buildings it planned to condemn by eminent domain in order to create a two-and-a-half-block tourism district designed to enhance the fortunes of the flagging Revel casino. Almost every other owner of the 62 low-rise buildings and adjoining parcels to be condemned accepted the prices they were offered for their properties, but not Charlie Birnbaum. Mr. Birnbaum, a genial 67-year-old piano tuner who has tuned pianos for Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett as well as almost every casino in Atlantic City, uses 311 Oriental Avenue, a weathered three-story brick walk-up with a Yamaha grand piano and a wide view of the ocean, as his workshop. More important than that, though, the 93-year-old house is suffused with the memories of Mr. Birnbaum’s parents, Holocaust survivors who found in the sand and sunlight of this city some relief from all they had suffered and for whom 311 Oriental was home for 30 years. The authority offered Mr. Birnbaum $237,000, but he said that he would not give the house up at any price. Image Mr. Birnbaum plays the piano in his parents’ house in Atlantic City. New Jersey’s casino development authority wants to condemn the property in order to create a tourism district. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times With the help of the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit, libertarian-leaning law firm that has challenged eminent domain proceedings in other municipalities, Mr. Birnbaum sued the casino development authority in State Superior Court, contending that it had no right to take private property for general purposes like a tourism district without specifically identifying what would eventually be built. And Mr. Birnbaum said he wanted people to know his story so they understood that eminent domain was not a faceless real estate swap, but a process that touched people with deep attachments to their properties. “I feel this house has been a refuge,” he said. “It’s my refuge now, and I don’t want to see it go.” In the landmark Kelo vs. City of New London case in 2005, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the benefits a community might realize from private development — jobs and tax revenue, for instance — could qualify as public uses under the Fifth Amendment. Though the institute lost the Kelo lawsuit, it defeated an attempt in the 1990s to seize an elderly widow’s Atlantic City home that was on the site of a planned limousine parking lot for a casino being built by Donald Trump. Mr. Birnbaum’s lawsuit, which was filed in May, has been complicated by the Revel’s bankruptcy filing in June and its impending closing. Despite the demise of the Revel, and the imminent closings of two other struggling Atlantic City casinos, the casino authority intends to proceed with the tourism district project, which it says will still be an enhancement in a city whose economic base has been seriously weakened by the availability of gambling in nearby states. On Thursday, Judge Julio J. Mendez of State Superior Court scheduled another round of arguments in the case for Oct. 6. Stuart M. Lederman, the lawyer for the casino authority, said that the details of the shops and restaurants to be erected can await a developer’s conceptions. He also noted that Mr. Birnbaum had not lived in the house for years; Mr. Birnbaum and his wife, Cindy, live in Hammonton, closer to Philadelphia. Image Mr. Birnbaum uses the house as his workshop and keeps a grand piano there. He has also kept it filled with family photographs, including one of his parents with their grandchildren. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times “Yes, it is a home in his family, but he makes it seem like we’re kicking him out with his babies,” Mr. Lederman said. Mr. Birnbaum said his commitment to keeping the house was to honor his parents, which he feels is just as valid. He was born in 1947 after his family was living in the Foehrenwald displaced persons camp near Munich, he said, recounting their history. His parents, Polish Jews, escaped the Nazis by hiding out in forests and joining the partisans. His mother, Dora, had lost her first husband and a 3-year-old daughter to Nazi slaughter, and his father, Abe, lost his wife. The couple married and in July 1944 gave birth to their first son, Sam. In wartime conditions, Ms. Birnbaum delivered her own baby. In 1952, the family moved to San Francisco, where an aunt lived, and then to Philadelphia, when Sam received a scholarship to study piano with Rudolf Serkin at the Curtis Institute of Music. Charlie, too, proved to be a talented pianist; at 11, he performed the first movement of a Mozart concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra. But in 1968, while he was studying music at Temple University and his mother was severely depressed, he was hospitalized for what he described as a psychotic breakdown. Feeling that he had let his vulnerable parents down, he said, he cut his throat and a wrist with another patient’s razor but survived. Image The Birnbaum family’s house offers wide views of the Atlantic Ocean just down the street. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Mr. Birnbaum’s father subsequently decided to move the family to a sunnier locale. He switched jobs to a Lit Brothers department store branch in Atlantic City, where he managed the popular smoke shop. The family bought 311 Oriental for $13,000 in 1969, and its fortunes improved. Mr. Birnbaum said his parents’ first half-dozen years in Atlantic City were sparkling, that his father would frolic in the waves and chat on the beach with other refugees. Charlie himself recovered his spirits, graduated summa cum laude from Temple, married and had two daughters, and taught music at his alma mater and at a local community college. “Atlantic City was a chance to start life over for my parents and for me,” he said. By the mid-1970s, the family’s neighborhood had become plagued by crime, abandonment and arson. Nonetheless, Mr. Birnbaum’s parents, both of whom he described as “fighters,” stayed. When his father’s health failed because of a ruptured esophagus, Mr. Birnbaum took a job as a piano tuner at Bally’s casino to keep an eye on his parents. He had taught himself tuning as a boy, he said, because his parents could not afford to pay someone to do the job. Not all of the memories associated with 311 Oriental are good ones. Twelve years after Mr. Birnbaum’s father died, in 1987, at age 73, his mother, then 86, and her 84-year-old live-in helper were beaten to death in the house by a robber. Yet Mr. Birnbaum kept the house, renting out the upper two floors while adapting the ground floor to repair piano strings and the instrument’s felt-hammer mechanisms. It is also something of a shrine, the yellowish kitchen appliances the same ones his mother used to cook borscht and blintzes, the walls and shelves adorned with celebratory newspaper clippings and faded family photographs. That is why he intends to fight until the courts rule against him. Said Mr. Birnbaum: “I’ll be able to say, ‘You were a mensch, you fought like a mensch, just like Poppa and Momma in difficult times.’ ” | Casino;Eminent domain;Commercial Real Estate;Atlantic City;Revel Entertainment Group;Institute for Justice |
ny0165143 | [
"technology"
] | 2006/07/28 | Record and Movie Industries Reach a Settlement With Kazaa | LONDON, July 27 — The music industry and Hollywood movie studios said Thursday that they had settled lawsuits against a longtime nemesis, the owner of the digital file-sharing network Kazaa, which will try to transform itself into a legitimate online distributor of films and music. Sharman Networks, a privately held company that is incorporated in Vanuatu and operates Kazaa from Australia, agreed to pay $115 million to the major record companies and movie studios, which had accused Kazaa of aiding the illegal copying of music on the Internet. Sharman Networks said the agreement, which follows a court ruling against Kazaa in Australia last year and a United States Supreme Court decision against other file-sharing services, cleared the way for it to offer “the broadest range of licensed content over Kazaa.” The chief executive of Sharman, Nikki Hemming, said, “All the parties involved now recognize the time is right to work together, and we are looking forward to collaborating with the music and motion picture companies to make P2P an integral part of the future of online digital entertainment.” Peer-to-peer network technology, or P2P, allows users to share computer files over the Internet, including music and movies stored in digital form. Kazaa was a pioneer of peer-to-peer network software. Under the settlement, Sharman will pay the major record companies “in excess of $100 million,” said John Kennedy, chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry in London. Executives who were briefed on the agreement said the total payment was $115 million; they did not provide a breakdown of payments. No details of the settlement with the movie studios were available. The music industry federation said that Sharman had agreed to license music from the four major recording companies — Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music and the EMI Group — that own the vast majority of music copyrights. Independent record labels are not included, but would be free to pursue their own licensing deals with Sharman, executives said. Sharman also said it would take steps to prevent unauthorized distribution of material through Kazaa. “We are under no illusion that this solves everything,” Mr. Kennedy said, noting that other file-sharing services thrive. “But this is very encouraging.” Under the agreement, the major recording companies will not invest directly in Kazaa but will be entitled to 20 percent of the proceeds of any eventual sale of the service, Mr. Kennedy said, giving them a stake in the success of the new arrangement. Music company executives welcomed the settlement, and Universal said it would share the proceeds with its artists. David Munns, vice chairman of EMI Music, said in a statement, “While the award may seem like a vast pot of money, it will merely offset the millions we have invested — and will continue to invest — in fighting illegal pirate operations around the world and protecting the works that our artists create.” In making the switch to a licensed, royalty-paying business, Kazaa would follow Napster, one of the original file-swapping services, which was reborn after an adverse court ruling in 2001. Kazaa has been earning revenue primarily from advertising, and Mr. Kennedy said the recording industry would not object if it persisted with an advertiser-supported model, rather than charging users, as long as it pays royalties. The movie industry has also begun to embrace peer-to-peer technology as a way to distribute material. Several download-to-own services, which allow users to buy digital files of films on the Internet, have also been started. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Kazaa, are named in the settlement because of their role in creating the Kazaa system, even though they sold it to Sharman in 2002. The settlement barred them from engaging in future behavior deemed to be in violation of copyright laws. Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis could not immediately be reached for comment. Previously, the music industry had succeeded in shutting down the file-sharing service Grokster, after the Supreme Court ruled against it and a co-defendant, StreamCast, which provides Morpheus software. The entertainment industry continues to pursue a copyright-infringement case against StreamCast. | KaZaA;Sharman Networks Ltd;Computers and the Internet;Music;Vanuatu;Australia |
ny0164179 | [
"us"
] | 2006/11/17 | Hospital Charged With Dumping Homeless Patient | LOS ANGELES, Nov. 16 (AP) — Prosecutors here announced civil and criminal charges against a major hospital chain on Thursday, saying it rid itself of a homeless patient by dumping her on crime-plagued skid row. A surveillance camera at a rescue mission recorded the patient, a demented 63-year-old, wandering around the streets in a hospital gown and slippers last March. In announcing the charges, the city attorney, Rocky Delgadillo, said a Kaiser Permanente hospital put the woman in a cab and sent her to the neighborhood even though she had serious, untreated health problems. “Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, part of Kaiser Permanente, the largest H.M.O. in the nation, will be held accountable for violating state law, its commitment to its patients, its obligations under the Hippocratic oath and, perhaps most importantly, principles of common decency,” Mr. Delgadillo said. Kaiser’s Bellflower hospital, which discharged the woman, is among 10 hospitals in the Los Angeles area under investigation on suspicion of discharging homeless patients onto the streets instead of into the custody of a relative or a shelter. The legal actions filed against Kaiser late Wednesday included criminal charges of false imprisonment and dependent adult endangerment, and civil charges involving the treatment of patients and laws on discharging them. Diana Bonta, vice president of public affairs for Kaiser Southern California, said the legal action unfairly demonized Kaiser, which she said had taken steps to see that no more of its patients were left on skid row. “It’s a big disappointment,” Ms. Bonta said of the charges. “They’re taking one isolated case and saying, ‘This is what hospitals do.’ In reality, hospitals are trying our best to take care of all people, including and especially the most vulnerable.” Ms. Bonta acknowledged that hospital officials had called a taxicab to take the woman to skid row, but added that they had called ahead to a shelter there to let workers know that she was coming. The woman found wandering on the street, Carol Ann Reyes, was taken in at the Union Rescue Mission. Its director, Andy Bales, said she continued to be cared for. No American hospital has ever been prosecuted on criminal charges of patient dumping, said Philip F. Mangano, the executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness and the Bush administration’s chief coordinator of homeless services. Mr. Mangano said patient dumping was widespread and added, “We need to hold hospitals accountable, but also work with them to resolve these issues.” | Hospitals;Homeless Persons;Kaiser Permanente |
ny0269752 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2016/04/21 | Mother Facing Kidnapping Charges in Australian Custody Dispute Is Released | BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Australian mother and television crew accused of snatching two young children on a Beirut street amid a custody dispute were released from prison by a Lebanese court on Wednesday, the Lebanese news media reported. The children’s mother, Sally Faulkner, and the four-person crew, including the prominent Australian journalist Tara Brown, had been charged with kidnapping at gunpoint and threatening the lives of children. But four others charged in the attempt — two Britons, including a man who ran a so-called child recovery agency, and two Lebanese — remained in prison under what was said to be a deal on custody arrangements and other matters struck with Ali al-Amin, the children’s father. “We are still waiting to confirm details, but yes, reports out of Beirut are that the team and Sally Faulkner are being released to return home,” a spokeswoman for Channel Nine, Victoria Buchan, wrote in an email on Wednesday. Quoting a judicial source, The Daily Star of Lebanon said that Ms. Faulkner had agreed to give up custody rights and not claim them in the future, but that she would be allowed to see the children in Lebanon in their father’s presence. The case, and what appeared to be the Australian channel’s plan to film the kidnapping and portray it as a rescue, has prompted some commentators in the Arab world and elsewhere to highlight what they say is a double standard: What would the reaction be, they ask, if an Arab parent and television crew did the same in Australia, Europe or the United States? Ms. Faulkner had accused her husband of seizing the children by taking them on what he said was a vacation to Lebanon and telling her they would never return. The seizure of the children was captured on CCTV footage and was later broadcast by the Lebanese news media. It appeared to show people jumping out of a car and grabbing them from their grandmother on a busy street. In interviews with the news media, the grandmother said that both she and a domestic helper had been hit or pushed to the ground. Channel Nine has said it had no connection to the people who snatched the children, denying reports that they had paid a six-figure fee to the child-recovery agency that essentially abducts children on behalf of one parent from estranged spouses accused of abducting the youngsters. Women seeking to retrieve children in Lebanese custody cases are at a disadvantage. Lebanese courts reflexively give custody to fathers in a system where family law is governed by the religion of the family involved. Lebanon has not signed the Hague Abduction Convention, which calls for children to be returned to their country of residence if taken by a family member. The children, Lahela, 5, and Noah, 3, were returned to their father after their mother was arrested last week. | Child Custody and Child Support;Kidnapping and Hostages;Australia;Lebanon;Sally Faulkner |
ny0186832 | [
"nyregion",
"thecity"
] | 2009/04/05 | A City’s Cinematic Backdrop, Unnoticed but Essential | AT the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street sits the Plaza, with its spiky stone finials and sea-green roof moldings. Across the street, a path cuts into the sprawl of Central Park. Uniformed carriage drivers stand by their horses, awaiting sightseers. Underground, the R train rumbles away. Even people who have never set foot in the city know the spot well; they have seen it on innumerable postcards and in books and films. Picture Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller “North by Northwest” being hustled out of the hotel and into the back seat of a parked car by two goons, having been mistaken for another man. “Don’t tell me where we’re going,” Grant quips. “Surprise me.” The car peels away and we are swiftly sealed in another world, our familiar surroundings receding in the rear-view mirror. Standing at the same corner half a century later, it’s not hard to feel a curious dissonance between the two places. There’s the tangible New York of concrete and smog, and there’s what the film historian James Sanders has called the “mythic New York,” the dreamy celluloid landscape of a thousand crisscrossing fictions. Both cities are magnificent constructions, each occupying a timeless space in the American imagination. New York belongs to Holly Golightly and Superman no less than it does to Robert Moses and Donald Trump. But a significant portion of the cinematic city goes unsung. What is dismissively referred to as stock footage — strips of existing film appropriated to fit another context — has been a mainstay of the motion picture industry virtually since its inception and continues to play a ubiquitous role in everything from glitzy popcorn fare to austere avant-garde experiments. At a moment when New York is celebrating new films — the Museum of Modern Art’s “New Directors/New Films” series ends this weekend, just weeks before the opening of the Tribeca Film Festival — it’s edifying and a bit humbling to consider cinema’s best-kept secret, the nondescript New York backgrounds and cutaways that glide by unnoticed. Like the blurred, Technicolor view of 59th Street scrolling behind Cary Grant’s head, these nearly subliminal images are nestled in the DNA of film history, generic referents seen (but not heard) in countless New York movies. The Birth of Stock For almost as long as there were movies, there was a need for supplementary material. In the silent era, filmmakers relied on simple tools like hand-painted backdrops to provide a sense of space, handicapped as they were by the ungainly size of early cameras and the stubborn chemistry of celluloid. Some toyed around with double exposures, superimposing one image upon another, but the results were rarely naturalistic. In the early teens, when the studios relocated from New York to Los Angeles, they promptly opened on-site film banks to store their extra footage — literally, whatever didn’t make the cut. Each vault contained thousands of feet of so-called B-roll and “trims” from previous productions, each reel indexed by length, setting, time of day and type of shot: close-up, tilt, pan and so on. These outtakes proved immensely valuable. Moviemakers could forgo the time and expense of shooting new material by simply repurposing existing stock. If a particular image was needed — say, a night exterior of the Brooklyn Bridge or a quick trip through the Bowery — the director simply called the in-house film archivist and plumbed the stacks for a viable match. The turning point came in the late ’20s, when a lowly negative cutter for Paramount named Hazel Marshall had a flash of insight. If the studio charged a minimum per order, Ms. Marshall reasoned, the catalog of existing images could be put to lucrative use with the licensing of clips to other parties. “Hazel’s idea,” said Jeff Goodman, an archivist at Producers Library in Los Angeles, the nation’s oldest stock-footage house, was “the key development that allowed the collections model to flourish.” Meanwhile, as cameras gradually became lighter and film stocks more sensitive to light, a handful of cameramen were capturing the city itself. Some were hired to document ceremonies like the completion of a bridge or an inaugural subway ride. Others were newsreel camera operators scampering around town to shoot prizefights and news conferences. Still others were simply men with movie cameras, 24-hour access to the city, no orders and no deadlines. Among them was a brash young cinematographer named Elmer Dyer, who was quick to recognize the potential value of stock footage. Within a decade, Mr. Dyer and other New York “outlaws,” as they were called, built their own libraries, amassing reels upon reels of film to be sold to the studios. Thus began a trend that would prove an indispensable if unacknowledged staple of the movie industry. There was something marvelously frenetic about this material. Unlike the meticulously constructed matte paintings and movable flats of the Hollywood soundstage, which so often read as stagy and wooden, this New York was incandescent, raw, dynamic. The lights of Coney Island flashed and glittered, clouds that drifted behind skyscrapers were luminous and ever shifting, and sun-dappled windows reflected a world of activity: bustling uptown shoppers, children skipping through a foaming water hydrant in Brooklyn. These disembodied images captured what no other medium had before — the real-time ambience of city life, the minutiae that are so often ignored but that in fact make up the bulk of urban experience. Evidence of Things Not Seen Despite its many uses, stock and its origins remain shrouded in obscurity. Movies trade in illusion, and the studios covered their tracks from the start. When it came to depicting locales like New York, the aim was to give audiences the impression that each film was built from scratch rather than cobbled together from old parts. “No one really knows where this stuff came from,” said Joan Sargent, an account executive at Getty Images, which owns the MGM stock footage library. Yet throughout the studio era, supplementary material was used copiously. Some images were excavated from government or private archives; others were custom-shot by small, frequently uncredited crews hired to collect images for specific projects. As early as the ’30s, new uses for such “invisible” footage were beginning to emerge, chief among them the back-projection process. Simply put, the effect was achieved by projecting a strip of previously photographed background footage onto a translucent screen and filming actors’ performances in front of it. A scene set in the car of a train, for instance, could be enriched by a synchronized landscape flickering in the window. Slightly weathered, a tinge overexposed, perhaps just out of step with the rest of the frame, back projections have become ingrained in our cultural ideography. What kind of mythic city would New York be without the blurred glimpses of Madison Avenue from 1950s melodramas, the dream-lit skylines seen in countless rooftop scuffles, the gauzy nocturnal expanse of Lower Manhattan from the deck of an approaching barge? Rear Windows Whether they seem enchantingly nostalgic or hopelessly contrived, back projections have helped give New York its unique cinematic identity. Think, for example, of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly and George Peppard as her amorous neighbor, Paul, in the taxi in the 1961 film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” The scene is the heart of the movie, the moment of truth for the lovesick couple. Holly, a naïve socialite who has spent her brief adult life running from her past, has opted to flee yet again, this time in pursuit of a Brazilian millionaire. Paul, who has been under her spell for months, begs her to remain in New York so that they can build a life together. He offers her the cat she had adopted and later abandoned, but Holly releases it into the rainy night. Only when Paul confronts her with the fact that she is not the free spirit she imagines she is, but a willing captive in her own internal prison, does Holly let herself recognize the value of his devotion. “That last scene in the cab, and when she goes and gets the cat and they’re hugging in the rain,” Richard Shepherd, the film’s producer, now 81, recalled wistfully. “I’m an old romantic, I guess, but that’s my favorite part of the picture.” Much of what provides the punch to this heartbreaking finale is the last thing you would expect to notice. On the surface, the scene is nothing new — a standard back-seat driving shot. In the foreground are two stars, clearly shot in a trick car on a soundstage. In the background, we see a gloomy, rain-swept street no doubt photographed on the Upper East Side. It could easily be Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall driving to the “21” Club in the 1956 film “Written on the Wind” or Ralph Bellamy and Rosalind Russell in the 1940 movie “His Girl Friday.” Yet something about the particular layering of the two worlds, the vérité New York and the romantic Hollywood artifice, lends a spectral mystique to an otherwise pedestrian composition. A very different sort of back-projection taxi ride appears in the 1957 movie “Sweet Smell of Success.” The scene begins with a smarmy, silver-tongued press agent, Sidney Falco (played by Tony Curtis), leaving the Elysian nightclub with Susan Hunsecker (Susan Harrison), younger sister of J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), New York’s reigning gossip columnist. As a cab shuttles them down Broadway, Falco tries to smooth-talk his way into her good graces by assuring her that J. J. will approve of her new lover, a humble jazz guitarist. Falco is lying through his perfect teeth: He has promised J. J. he will break up the couple and is slyly covering up the fact that he is planning to run a smear the following morning. Through the window of the taxi one can see a Broadway bloated with squalor: filthy puddles, glaring lights, gusts of steam, oily storefronts. The coarse, high-contrast documentary look recalls the 1948 film “The Naked City,” shot on location in New York. By contrast, the interior of the cab — the light diffuse, the focus sharp — appears comfortably protective, even luxurious. Even greater contrast is found in movie musicals of the period. At the top of the list is “On the Town,” Stanley Donen’s buoyant 1949 romp about three sailors in the city for a day, eager to see the sights. The metropolis is saturated with vibrant primary colors and populated by wisecracking dames. The endless rush of scenery is as charged with giddy youthfulness as Leonard Bernstein’s boisterous score. Although nearly all of the film was shot on sets in MGM’s Stage 30, fragments of the authentic city appear throughout. The famous “New York, New York” montage in the opening moments places the trio amid the flux of Wall Street, the dizzying panorama of an observation deck and the serpentine paths of Central Park, among other hot spots. Lovelier still are the composite images that pepper the famous chase scene. As the sailors and their newly acquired girlfriends race downtown in a taxi, trailed by a fleet of police cars, the dimmest member of the group (Jules Munshin) pops his head through the sun roof into a fuzzy back-projection of Times Square. The garish awnings and lusterless light have a palette and a texture wholly distinct from the principal photography. Flashes and Fades Other fleeting yet indelible images of New York abound in so-called transitional shots, those small dabs of cinematic glue that provide visual bridges between scenes or sequences. A towering office building gleams through the clouds. Fireworks crackle over the Hudson River. Dilapidated tenements throw chiseled shadows over a vacant courtyard on the Lower East Side. A wind-tossed calendar dissolves to the exterior of a brownstone. These are the movie equivalent of a comic book narrator saying, “Meanwhile” or “Later that day” at the top of the panel. Inserts, cutaways and other devices help to flesh out the environment or to deliver simple packets of information to the audience. A plane touches down on a hazy runway at Kennedy Airport , indicating that a character has arrived. A scratchy, time-lapsed skyline, punctuated by the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings glittering in the haze, tells us simply that night has fallen. Like the invisible flickers in a projected beam — you are actually watching a black screen an accumulated two-thirds of the time without knowing it — these are the things you see when there is nothing to see. Yet they remain in memory, continuously shaping and refining our sense of the mythic city. Neither Here Nor There Nowadays, stock footage is so ubiquitous, and so seamlessly appropriated, that even experts have trouble identifying it. Who would have guessed that blockbusters like “The Bourne Ultimatum” relied on Manhattan exteriors provided by Index Stock Shots, a London-based stock footage library? Or that the opening aerials in the “Sex and the City” movie were repurposed from a Los Angeles film licensor called BlackLight Films? Or that the sprawling shots of the financial district in “Confessions of a Shopaholic” came from Aerial HD Stock? That’s the idea. We’re not supposed to notice. Essentially, the purpose of stock is to vanish in the process, to “efface itself,” as the industry guru Rick Prelinger put it in an interview. While other types of film tend to indicate not only a specific time and place but also the intentions of the filmmaker, stock footage emerges, ghostlike, from the streets themselves, as if no one in particular had composed it. In this sense, stock might be said to occupy a kind of netherworld between movies and real life. Perhaps this accounts for the strange and wonderful dissonance you might feel standing at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, where Cary Grant began his great adventure. It’s the place where the two New Yorks, the mythic and the authentic, converge. | Movies;New York City |
ny0291076 | [
"world",
"africa"
] | 2016/01/30 | Burundi Mass Grave Clues Seen in Satellite Photos, Group Says | NAIROBI, Kenya — Satellite imagery of the outskirts of Burundi ’s capital supports emerging accounts of graves holding at least 50 people who died during political violence last month, the human rights organization Amnesty International said on Friday. The report added to the growing evidence of organized atrocities in the country. Observers say they believe the violence was largely carried out by the Burundian government and by pro-government forces, amid immense turmoil since President Pierre Nkurunziza announced in April his intention to seek a third term in office. Separately on Friday, France protested the detention of two journalists working for the newspaper Le Monde — a French correspondent, Jean-Philippe Rémy, and a British photographer, Philip Moore — on Thursday in the capital, Bujumbura. The newspaper reported later on Friday that the two men had been released, but had not gotten back their seized cellphones, notebooks, cameras or audio recorders. The two were arrested while they were interviewing opponents of the government, and the authorities accused the journalists of collaborating with violent rebels, Le Monde said. The new evidence of mass graves is sure to raise alarm over the situation in Burundi, which was once a part of German East Africa and later became a colony of Belgium. It gained independence in 1962. The United Nations identified nine mass graves this months that its investigators said contained at least 100 bodies, and it reported that at least 130 people had been killed since December. It also said that the Burundian security forces had engaged in gang rape and other atrocities. Nearly 100 people were killed on Dec. 11 and Dec. 12, when opposition gunmen attacked military installations around Bujumbura and security forces responded with reprisals and arrests in opposition-stronghold neighborhoods. More than 30 bodies, mangled and bloated, were strewn through Bujumbura’s streets on the morning of Dec. 12. Amnesty International, citing witnesses, said that there were up to 53 bodies, and that more could be buried in multiple mass graves at two different sites. Analysis by Amnesty International on Friday of photographs and videos of the Buringa area of Bujumbura showed patches of recently disturbed earth in areas where, according to witnesses, corpses were transported hours after the recent violence. One satellite image from December showed what appeared to be a heavily uprooted patch of sandy earth that, in an earlier image in November, did not appear to have been disturbed. “These images suggest a deliberate effort by the authorities to cover up the extent of the killings by their security forces and to prevent the full truth from coming out,” Muthoni Wanyeki, the regional director for Amnesty International, said in a statement. The State Department has said it is “ deeply alarmed ” by reports of mass graves and enforced disappearances after the political violence in Burundi. | Burundi;War Crimes,Genocide,Crimes Against Humanity;Amnesty International;Pierre Nkurunziza |
ny0112419 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2012/02/24 | In Inwood, Urban Paul Bunyans Wield Chainsaws in the Name of Safety | Residents of Inwood who glanced out their windows this week might be forgiven for thinking that city employees had confused the Great North Woods, and its logging traditions, with the northernmost tip of Manhattan. Starting last Monday, a large-scale tree-cutting operation involving 20 trucks and 50 workers targeted large swaths of Isham and Inwood Hill Park s. By Thursday, workers dangling from ropes and wielding chainsaws had cut down 100 trees and pruned more than 200 others, parks department officials said, with more oaks, maples and mulberries expected to topple on Friday. These urban Paul Bunyans are not guilty of arborcide, the officials said; they have made the area safer. Many of the trees had been weakened by wind and disease over the years and were poised to fall and cause injury, according to William Castro, the borough parks commissioner for Manhattan. A group of trees lining a path through Isham Park off Broadway, for instance, could have crashed into living rooms in nearby apartments if a tropical storm were to blow through, Mr. Castro said. Some of the trees that were trimmed back, including a few near Park Terrace East, were targeted after consulting with the Police Department, to combat a recent series of muggings in the area, officials said. Streets that cut through woody areas can be somewhat desolate at night. On Thursday, many residents seemed disappointed that their forests had been thinned, even if it was done with their best interests in mind. “My first thought was that I hope they plant some trees to take their place,” said Martin Morua, 43, as he stood at the edge of Isham Park near where some large trees had been removed. As he spoke, his daughter Melissa threw crushed Saltines to a group of a dozen hopping birds. “I think kids gravitate toward nature,” he said. Even some who have had brushes with violence in Inwood seemed upset that any part of the trees had been removed, whether limbs or entire trunks. Elizabeth Terranova, 25, said that one night in 2009 as she was walking along Seaman Avenue, a man who was following her tried to convince her to go into the park with him. She ran away. Still, “I think that maybe they could just put up more lights,” said Ms. Terranova, a public health student, as she walked her black cat Kemet on a leash among the piles of freshly cut timber. Victor Tiburcio, a 37-year resident of Inwood who sat on a mountain bike near a group of kids playing baseball, was even blunter. “Trees clean the air,” he said. But Linda Wissbrun, who has lived in the neighborhood for four decades, thought that the selective clearing could actually improve the health of the landscape, though only time would tell. “We won’t know till spring or summer,” she said as she walked along Park Terrace West, “if they took too many down.” | Trees and Shrubs;Inwood Hill Park (NYC);Parks and Recreation Department (NYC);Police Department (NYC);Manhattan (NYC);Isham Park (NYC) |
ny0200806 | [
"technology",
"companies"
] | 2009/09/17 | Canada Won’t Review Nortel Wireless Sale | OTTAWA — Tony Clement, the industry minister for Canada, said on Wednesday that his department would not review the takeover of the wireless assets of bankrupt Nortel Networks by Ericsson of Sweden. Some Canadians, most prominently the co-chief executives of Research in Motion, the BlackBerry maker, asked Mr. Clement to examine the sale under foreign investment review laws. They argued that because the company had benefited from Canadian government assistance, its assets should remain under domestic control. R.I.M. also charged that it had been effectively and unfairly barred from bidding. But in a statement, Mr. Clement praised the $1.13 billion takeover of the unit which, unlike many other parts of Nortel, is profitable. “This deal is beneficial to Canada and will help Canada compete on the world stage,” the minister said. A review by his department, he added, found that not enough of the wireless operation’s assets are in Canada to meet the threshold for review under the foreign investment regulations. Speaking to reporters in Toronto, Mr. Clement said that there was also no evidence that Nortel’s future wireless technology, the assets of most interest to Ericsson, were developed using government money. Nortel itself has said that its lack of profits for the last several years made it unable to exploit tax concessions. In any case, Nortel is only licensing patents related to that technology under the terms of its sale agreement with Ericsson. Separately, Nortel said courts in Ontario and Delaware had approved the sale of another unit, which makes networking equipment for corporations and governments, to Avaya. Verizon, a major Nortel customer, had objected to the $900 million deal in the Delaware bankruptcy court on national security grounds. But that court concluded that Verizon’s concerns were commercial, rather than national, in nature. | Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures;Nortel Networks Corp;Telefon AB LM Ericsson;Canada |
ny0225772 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2010/10/10 | At Grand Jewelers in Queens, One-Man Watch Repair | When Marcel Zalaznick goes on vacation, a once-a-year event, he hangs a sign outside his watch-repair store on 30th Avenue that says, “Gone fishing.” Mr. Zalaznick, 59, is the proprietor and the sole employee of Grand Jewelers, a type of small business that feels like a rarity these days. It has been in the same spot in Queens for a long time, it turns a (modest) profit, and it is unaffected by the whims of the commercial real estate market because its owner is also its landlord. In an age of fads and disposability, Mr. Zalaznick fixes watches that may have cost $13 or $13,000 but are worth much more to the people who wear them. From behind bulletproof glass, in a space about as wide as the aisles of an airplane’s first-class cabin, he manipulates tools that are Swiss made and high end: one contraption that opens watch cases and another that closes them; a device that checks if a waterproof watch is still waterproof; a machine that checks if a watch is running too fast or too slow within a 24-hour period. Mr. Zalaznick likes to talk, and if you ask, he might tell you why a cheap quartz watch is a more accurate timepiece than a pristine Rolex. If you observe him, you might notice that he maneuvers like a surgeon, probing a watch’s innards to figure out why it has failed. If you linger, you will see that after 37 years in business, he has gotten pretty good at telling the type of repair a certain customer will be willing to pay for or how fast she might need it done. He did not, for example, try to dissuade a longtime customer from getting her $39 Lorus fixed for the sixth time. “Last time she came by, I told her she should think about getting a new watch, but she just kind of growled,” he said. “What can I do? She likes this one.” (The woman kissed the watch after he handed it back to her and exclaimed, “On time!” before walking away.) Mr. Zalaznick still repairs classic and expensive timepieces, including Bulovas, Movados and Rolexes. But these days, he said, he also fixes “sports watches, colorful watches, watches so big they look like baby alarm clocks.” Most of his business comes from people who walk in with one watch or maybe two, though he also contracts with jewelry stores that sell watches but do not have the expertise to make the repairs. Mr. Zalaznick was born in Paris, but speaks no French. His parents moved there from the former Czechoslovakia after World War II and came to the United States when he was 2. He has a history degree from the University of Maine, but could not find work after he graduated in 1972. His father was a watchmaker and suggested he learn the trade. Grand Jewelers is open Monday to Friday during business hours, more or less. Mr. Zalaznick, who lives on Long Island, gets in between 9 and 10 a.m., depending on traffic, and gets out between 4 and 5 p.m., “depending on my mood,” he said. He does not really go fishing when he takes time off — his last vacation, this summer, was a week with relatives in Torrington, Conn. “Fishing is boring,” he said. “I really just travel.” | Watches and Clocks;Jewels and Jewelry;Astoria (NYC) |
ny0120947 | [
"sports",
"olympics"
] | 2012/07/23 | United States Beats Argentina in Olympic Exhibition | BARCELONA, Spain — For 40 minutes Sunday, the United States men’s national team and Argentina exchanged as many elbows as made baskets and Kevin Durant played dual roles as resident sharpshooter and bodyguard of point guards. This exhibition game, friendly only in the technical sense, sometimes looked more like a rugby scrum. At one point, Durant stepped between his teammate, point guard Chris Paul, and Argentina’s burly, bearded forward, Luis Scola. Words were exchanged, perhaps in two languages, along with some light shoves. When it ended with an 86-80 victory by the Americans, all sides labeled the skirmish minor, far from an international incident. Instead, Team USA insisted this was exactly the kind of challenge it needed with its first Olympic basketball game less than a week away: a rough, close contest that Coach Mike Krzyzewski called “our first real international game” and a “great game for us.” Durant summarized the evening thusly: “I won’t let anybody get in the point guard’s face.” This, the fourth of five exhibition games for the United States in advance of the London Games, had been billed as the Americans’ most difficult test yet. Early on, it felt more like pop quiz in which the Americans obtained the answers beforehand. The United States trampled Argentina early. It was easy to forget that Argentina ranked among the most experienced and successful international teams of the last decade. In the opening barrage, Durant dropped in three 3-pointers, Kobe Bryant scored 10 points and the United States took a 19-3 lead — in the first two and a half minutes. Durant made four 3-pointers in the first half alone; his length (6 feet 9 inches with long arms), accuracy and the shorter international 3-point line proved a deadly, almost unfair, combination. The United States also compiled 11 assists on 16 baskets in the first half. Argentina withstood the initial salvo and trimmed the deficit slowly, until at halftime the once insurmountable American lead stood at a manageable 47-40. Fans flocked to Palau Sant Jordi early, coloring the arena in a kaleidoscope of N.B.A. jerseys: hundreds of jerseys that covered decades of players and most teams. One fan wore a Durant Seattle SuperSonics jersey. Another wore the Nets’ No. 3 of Drazen Petrovic, the Croat who died in 1993. One group wore three different Carmelo Anthony jerseys (Syracuse, Knicks, USA Basketball). The United States team arrived in special uniforms as well, retro duds designed with a nod to the Dream Team, which won a gold medal here in 1992. Current American players and coaches took a few hundred questions about their predecessors before they practiced Sunday. They seemed overwhelmed by the topic, if not mildly annoyed. Krzyzewski, an assistant with the Dream Team, said what he remembered most was the way that team changed international basketball, how it elevated interest across the world. His players, while deferential, mostly shrugged. When David Robinson, a center in 1992, traveled here to reminisce, he met Anthony Davis, the youngest player on the United States team. Davis shocked Robinson with his birth year: 1993. In some ways, the sustained excellence achieved by Argentina was a byproduct of the Dream Team and its international influence. Led by Scola and Manu Ginobili, Argentina won the silver medal at the 2002 world championships and captured gold at the Athens Games in 2004. This Argentina team, with eight players over the age of 30, was supposed to be too old for true contention, on the wrong end of a last hurrah. Yet each time the United States appeared primed to pull away Sunday, Argentina kept it close. It nearly tied the game late in the fourth quarter. Ginobili drove left, drew contact from Anthony and banked in an off-balance layup. The ensuing free throw made it 78-74. Durant and Paul answered with 3-pointers, and Team USA ultimately held on. After four exhibition games, the United States has answered many of the questions that followed it through training camp earlier this month. The condensed N.B.A. season has not led to Olympic fatigue, not yet anyway. The undersize roster, with plenty of taller players but only one center in Tyson Chandler, has not been a problem on offense or defense. Again, not yet. Instead, Krzyzewski continued Sunday to tinker with his lineup, so myriad are the options. Durant again started instead of Anthony, and Durant’s 27 points led all scorers. Krzyzewski said Durant “looked like he did in Istanbul,” when he won most valuable player honors at the 2010 world championships. Krzyzewski also started Paul at point guard instead of Deron Williams. Another exhibition, against Spain here Tuesday night, loomed as the Americans left the court without a hint of celebration. Spain represents the biggest threat to their gold medal chances in London, and here, at the site of USA Basketball’s greatest moment, the latest Team USA hoped to send a statement greater than the one it made Sunday. Which was, roughly: nobody gets in the point guard’s face. | Basketball;Olympic Games (2012);Argentina;United States;Durant Kevin;Olympic Games;London (England) |
ny0210905 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2017/01/02 | Suicide Bombing in Baghdad Kills at Least 36 | BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber detonated a pickup truck loaded with explosives on Monday in a busy Baghdad market, killing at least 36 people hours after President François Hollande of France arrived in the Iraqi capital. The Islamic State later claimed responsibility for the attack. The bomb went off in a produce market that was packed with day laborers, a police officer said, adding that another 52 people were wounded. During a news conference with Mr. Hollande, Haider al-Abadi, Iraq ’s prime minister, said the suicide bomber had pretended to be a man seeking to hire day laborers. Once the workers gathered around, he detonated the vehicle. The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, claimed the attack in a statement circulated on a website that is often used by the group. It was the third such attack in three days in or near Baghdad, underscoring the lingering threat posed by the extremist group despite a string of setbacks for it elsewhere in the country over the past year, including in and around the northern city of Mosul. The attack took place in Sadr City, a vast Shiite district in eastern Baghdad that has been repeatedly targeted by Sunni extremists since the 2003 American-led invasion. Militiamen loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr were seen evacuating bodies in their trucks before ambulances arrived. Bodies were scattered across the bloody pavement alongside fruit, vegetables and laborers’ shovels and axes. A minibus filled with dead passengers was on fire. Asaad Hashim, 28, an owner of a nearby cellphone store, described how the laborers had pushed and shoved around the bomber’s vehicle, trying to get hired. “Then a big boom came, sending them up into the air,” said Mr. Hashim, who suffered shrapnel wounds to his right hand. He blamed “the most ineffective security forces in the world” for failing to prevent the attack. An angry crowd cursed the government, even after a representative of Mr. Sadr tried to calm them. Late last month, the Iraqi authorities started removing some of the security checkpoints in Baghdad in a bid to ease traffic for the capital’s six million residents. “We have no idea who will kill at any moment and who’s supposed to protect us,” said Ali Abbas, a 40-year-old father of four who was hurled over his vegetable stand by the blast. “If the securities forces can’t protect us, then allow us to do the job.” Several smaller bombings elsewhere in the city on Monday killed at least 20 civilians and wounded at least 70, according to medics and police officials. All officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters. The United States State Department condemned the attacks. Separately, the American military announced on Monday the death of a coalition service member in Iraq in a “noncombat-related incident,” without providing further details. Mr. Hollande met with Mr. Abadi and President Fuad Masum, and later traveled to the self-governing northern Kurdish region to meet with French troops and local officials. He pledged to help displaced Iraqis return to Mosul , where Iraqi forces are waging a large offensive against the Islamic State. France is part of the American-led coalition formed in 2014 to fight the Islamic State after the extremist group seized large areas in Iraq and neighboring Syria. France has suffered multiple attacks claimed by the extremist group. | Terrorism;Islam;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Baghdad;Iraq |
ny0205919 | [
"business"
] | 2009/01/23 | Guilty Plea in Tax Shelter Case | A former investment adviser pleaded guilty on Thursday to helping the accounting firm Ernst & Young sell bogus tax shelters that illegally allowed scores of wealthy investors to evade taxes on billions of dollars in income. The adviser, Charles Bolton, of Memphis, Tenn., was indicted in February 2008 by Manhattan federal prosecutors for his role in making and selling the shelters from 1999 through recent years, and for lying to the Internal Revenue Service. Ernst & Young has been under federal scrutiny since 2004 over its tax shelter work but has not been charged. Mr. Bolton, 46, pleaded guilty to one information count of conspiracy. He owned several companies that sold bogus tax shelters marketed by a unit of Ernst & Young known as VIPER, or ”value ideas produce extraordinary results,” that was responsible for marketing aggressive shelters to wealthy individuals, according to court papers. A spokesman for Ernst & Young did not immediately return calls requesting comment. A lawyer for Mr. Bolton, who faces five years in jail upon sentencing in April, could not be reached for comment. Mr. Bolton was indicted in a superseding charge brought against four Ernst & Young defendants who were originally charged in 2007. Those defendants are Richard Shapiro; Robert Coplan, who is also a former Internal Revenue Service official; Martin Nissenbaum; and Brian Vaughn. The shelters in question, called C.D.S., for contingent deferred swaps, and C.D.S. add-on, involved financial trades that were carried out by the Bolton companies. In his plea agreement, Mr. Bolton said that he implemented dozens of the shelters involving billions of dollars in taxable gains and income. Mr. Bolton also admitted to using the shelters to illegally shield from taxes $40 million in personal income in 2000 and 2001. Prosecutors said that Ernst & Young worked with a network of banks, law firms and investment boutiques to sell a variety of bogus tax shelters starting in the late 1990s. A rival accounting firm, KPMG, paid $456 million in 2005 to avert indictment — typically a death knell — over its role in questionable tax shelters. | Ernst & Young;Tax Shelters;Bolton Charles |
ny0233960 | [
"world",
"africa"
] | 2010/08/25 | At Least 30 Killed in Attack on Hotel in Somalia | NAIROBI, Kenya — Somali insurgents disguised in government military uniforms stormed a Mogadishu hotel on Tuesday and killed at least 30 people, including 4 lawmakers, laying bare how vulnerable Somalia ’s government is, even in an area it claims to control. The insurgents methodically moved room to room, killing hotel guests who tried to bolt their doors shut, Somali officials said. When government forces finally cornered the insurgents, two blew themselves up with suicide vests. The attack shows that “operational momentum has shifted to the insurgents, who can go anywhere they want except where the African peacekeepers are deployed,” said J. Peter Pham, senior vice president at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. Several Somali politicians said that the government was so thoroughly under siege that it could work only from behind fortified, sandbagged positions, and that the shrinking government enclave in Mogadishu, the capital, could soon vanish altogether. “The problem is the government is not working hard on security; it’s the same old thing,” said Asha A. Abdalla, a member of Parliament who was in Nairobi during the attack. Like many others in the 550-member Somali Parliament, Mrs. Asha often stays in Kenya because of the dangers in Somalia. “But I don’t know what the A.U. is doing, either,” she said, referring to the more than 6,000 African Union troops in Mogadishu. “If they are not protecting M.P.’s, who are they protecting?” The most powerful insurgents are the Shabab , a militant Islamist group that has stoned civilians to death and pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda. The Shabab seem to be constantly two steps ahead of Somalia’s transitional government, analysts say, even though the government receives tens of millions of dollars in security aid from the United States and other Western countries. American officials have said the government, however weak and disorganized, is the best bulwark against a Shabab-ruled Somalia, though the Shabab already rule much of Somalia. The battle now seems to be turning to Mogadishu, specifically the few neighborhoods that the government still marginally controls, like the areas around the presidential palace, seaport and airport. This year, Somali government officials promised to sweep the Shabab out of the capital and expand their zone . But government forces have been plagued by defections and apathy, Somali commanders concede, and it seems that the Shabab are the ones on the offensive. The hotel raid followed intense shelling against government positions on Monday, which killed dozens of people and sent shells crashing into camps for internally displaced people. “There’s been fierce fighting and the government is getting pushed back,” said Abdirizak Farah, a shopkeeper who fled his home at 4 a.m. Tuesday to seek shelter closer to government troops. The three-story hotel that was attacked, the Muna, was popular among Somali lawmakers because it was thought to be secure and was located less than a mile away from the presidential palace in a breezy seaside neighborhood. Witnesses said that a group of about three to five insurgents appeared at the gate at 10:30 a.m. wearing government military uniforms, and that as soon as the hotel guards opened the way for them, the gunmen opened fire. They then rushed into the hotel corridors, shooting everyone in sight. Government forces arrived a few minutes later and battled the insurgents room by room, eventually pushing the gunmen to the upper floor. According to witnesses, several lawmakers tried to lock themselves in their rooms, but they were hunted down and shot at close range with assault rifles. “They killed everyone they saw inside the hotel and then blew themselves up,” said Abdirahman Omar Osman, Somalia’s information minister. The government initially said six lawmakers had been killed, but later revised the number to four. The information minister called the attack “murder” and said it was “against Islamic religion,” especially during the holy month of Ramadan . Another Somali official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the Shabab were “using all tactics.” “They don’t care about Ramadan,” the official said. “They are criminals. They are terrorists.” An 11-year-old shoeshine boy and a woman selling tea near the hotel were also killed, African Union officials said. The hotel raid seemed to have been planned well in advance, and several residents living near the hotel said that Shabab fighters had been renting rooms for weeks in their neighborhood, leading them to expect a major attack. A Shabab spokesman on Tuesday said that Shabab “special forces” were the ones who stormed the hotel. Earlier on Tuesday, the government claimed to have captured one of the attackers. The last time the government was dealt such a deadly blow was in December, when the Shabab killed four government ministers in a suicide bombing at a medical school graduation in another hotel in the government zone. Then in July, the Shabab claimed responsibility for killing dozens of World Cup fans in coordinated bombings in Uganda, saying it was revenge against Ugandan peacekeepers. Analysts said that Tuesday’s raid on the hotel, though, was something different, with gunmen going toe-to-toe against government forces in an area teeming with government troops, which seemed to be a sign of increasingly brazen and confident insurgents. Somalia has lurched from crisis to crisis since 1991, when the central government collapsed. Several Somali officials have conceded that if it were not for the African Union peacekeepers, the government would fall, most likely in hours. | Mogadishu (Somalia);Terrorism;Somalia;Al-Shabab |
ny0287451 | [
"sports",
"soccer"
] | 2016/08/29 | Duel of Suitors Yields an M.L.S. Franchise for Minnesota | ST. PAUL — A David and Goliath story generally requires a David to root for, but neither side competing for the M.L.S. expansion franchise in Minnesota resembled a boy with a slingshot. Instead, this one featured two Goliaths: The rich, powerful Wilf family, owner of the Minnesota Vikings and their new $1 billion fixed-roof stadium, versus a formidable soccer-centric group that included some of the richest people in the state but lacked a stadium. William W. McGuire, the former chief executive of UnitedHealth Group and the owner of the Minnesota United of the North American Soccer League, heads the second group, and last year he outmaneuvered the Wilfs and landed the expansion franchise by promising to build an open-air soccer-specific stadium with private money — a rarity in American professional sports. McGuire’s group committed $250 million — a $100 million M.L.S. expansion fee and $150 million for the new stadium — to bring top-level professional soccer to a state that has had five professional teams since the 1970s. At a rally on Aug. 19 at the downtown minor league baseball stadium, about 1,400 fans watched as M.L.S. Commissioner Don Garber confirmed that Minnesota United would begin play in 2017. “I’m glad somebody who’s strictly going to focus on soccer is going to keep a team in the Twin Cities and push it as high as it can go,” said Bruce McGuire, a Minnesota soccer blogger and scarf-wearing member of the United’s primary fan group, the Dark Clouds. “It’s thrilling,” said McGuire, who is not related to the team’s owner. The bid by the Vikings owners, Bruce McGuire said, “scared the hell out of me.” “The sport I love would be a second priority,” McGuire said. “The N.F.L. is a gold mine, and everything else has to be second.” William McGuire, too, feared that the Vikings group would land the franchise. “There was always a chance the league would look at that situation and say, ‘This is what we want to do,’” said William McGuire, who is widely known as Bill. “We didn’t think it was the right thing to do. Obviously, we had our own bias. Our view was, the best thing for soccer is to have soccer-specific stadiums, if it could be pulled off, rather than putting the sport into a stadium that’s fundamentally built for something else.” In the end, M.L.S. officials preferred McGuire’s vision of an intimate 20,000-seat outdoor field on natural grass over the soaring 66,000-seat U.S. Bank Stadium, the new home of the Vikings. Construction of the soccer stadium, midway between Minneapolis and St. Paul, should begin this fall, McGuire said. The club will play on artificial turf at the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium next season and most of 2018. Image The league will instead add a version of Minnesota United F.C., from the North American Soccer League. Credit Andy Clayton-King/Getty Images Curiously, the Vikings’ stadium opened Aug. 3 with an International Champions Cup match between A.C. Milan and Chelsea that drew 64,101, the largest crowd to watch professional soccer in the state. The same night, United played in the northern suburb of Blaine, timing that irritated United supporters and hurt the club’s ticket sales. The N.A.S.L. match attracted 6,101, about 2,000 below United’s league-best average. Bill McGuire read nothing sinister or vindictive into the overlap, preferring to celebrate how 70,000 people turned out on a Wednesday night to watch professional soccer in Minnesota. (ESPN, International Champions Cup officials and the competing clubs chose the date, not the Vikings.) “It’s unfortunate it was the day we had a home game,” McGuire said. “I don’t even know if they knew we had a game. I assume they didn’t until after the fact, and then it’s what it was.” He added: “I think everybody’s fine. We’re all going to work together to do things to make this a better place.” Unlike many of United’s fans, McGuire came late to soccer. Born in Troy, N.Y., the 6-foot-6 McGuire played basketball at Clear Creek High School in Texas, near Galveston. He paid much more attention to butterflies and fishing than soccer, at least until 2011, when the N.A.S.L. assumed control of its failing Minnesota franchise known as the Stars. The N.A.S.L. commissioner at the time, David Downs, contacted an old roommate of his daughter’s at Amherst College, Marissa McGuire (Bill’s daughter), to ask about potential owners. Bill McGuire was not interested. He reconsidered in 2012 after attending two games and meeting fans who traced their soccer allegiance to the Minnesota Kicks, a popular 1970s N.A.S.L. franchise that shared the old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington with the Minnesota Twins and the Vikings. “We looked at it, watched a few games, said we’ll step in and do this — far, far underestimating what the ‘it’ was,” said McGuire, who viewed it as a philanthropic endeavor. McGuire said that it made sense to keep the team going and to see what would happen. It was not analyzed extensively on a financial basis, he said. “It was something we should not let disappear from the community after 35, 36 years,” he said. “That would be inconsistent with the demographics of our society and certainly this community.” Image Fans at the Aug. 3 match. William W. McGuire, the former chief executive of UnitedHealth Group and the owner of the Minnesota United, ultimately won the bidding war. Credit Hannah Foslien/Getty Images McGuire saw room for significant growth of Minnesota soccer among millennials and the soccer-loving Hmong and Somali immigrant communities. He renamed the club Minnesota United F.C. in 2013, with a local branding firm incorporating Minnesota’s state bird, the loon, into its logo. Downs also had no quarrel with McGuire’s past. A pulmonologist, McGuire resigned as UnitedHealth’s chief executive in 2006 while the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated him because he was suspected of backdating stock options. Without admitting guilt, McGuire paid a $7 million penalty to the S.E.C., agreed to forfeit $620 million in stock option gains and retirement pay and was barred for 10 years from serving as a director or officer of a public company. The ban ends in 2017. In 2014, led by midfielder Miguel Ibarra, who played well enough to earn a rare N.A.S.L. call-up to the United States national team, Minnesota United finished with the league’s best record. Season ticket sales jumped to 5,200 this season from 242 in 2013. Last year, the club added bleachers to its National Sports Center stadium in Blaine, for a capacity of about 9,000. McGuire said that he had had no plans to take United out of the N.A.S.L. until M.L.S. began sniffing around the Minnesota market. “When we realized M.L.S. wanted to be here, we thought, We’re the ones that should be involved with it, because we’re all about soccer at that point,” he said. And McGuire realized he could not wait for the slow-moving State Legislature to approve stadium financing, which was unlikely. So McGuire and seven partners agreed to finance the stadium themselves, and are going ahead with construction while awaiting the Legislature’s approval of minor tax breaks. The group includes the Minnesota Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor; the Pohlad family, which owns the Minnesota Twins; and Marilyn Carlson Nelson, a former executive at Carlson, a large hospitality firm. After a dalliance with a property in Minneapolis, the team struck a deal to build it in St. Paul. Before joining M.L.S., it must upgrade its roster, which most likely will bear little resemblance to the current one. To Manny Lagos, a former M.L.S. player and a 1992 United States Olympian from St. Paul who gave up coaching the team this season to become United’s technical director, that two groups were competing for an M.L.S. franchise shows how far the Minnesota market has come in soccer. He is just glad his Goliath won. “I don’t look at that scenario as a battle,” Lagos said. “It’s significant, because it tells me more people are going to start looking at Minnesota and the potential. As someone who grew up here, that’s pretty amazing, because for a while we were trying to raise our hand and get recognized, and it was very hard.” | Soccer;Stadiums Arenas;MLS;Minnesota United Soccer Team;William W McGuire;Minneapolis;Minnesota |
ny0073837 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2015/04/16 | Tax Returns Show Cuomo’s Income Rose in 2014, Largely From Memoir Deal | ALBANY — According to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s memoir, all things are possible. Recouping his book’s advance, however, may not be. Such was one of the hard fiscal facts laid out when Mr. Cuomo, like millions of other Americans, dutifully obeyed the April 15 tax deadline. Unlike other citizens, however, politicians are usually compelled by tradition to release the sometimes uncomfortable details of their earnings, and Mr. Cuomo did exactly that on Wednesday, releasing his state and federal returns for 2014. (Well, sort of: As is customary, Mr. Cuomo did not provide to-go copies of his federal and state returns, but rather allowed reporters to view — and return — the filings.) The viewing, however, provided several salient details on the governor’s finances, which were robust in 2014: Mr. Cuomo had an adjusted gross income of $553,371, up sharply from the previous year, when he reported $358,448. A large part of the increase in 2014 came from a $376,667 payment for his book, “All Things Possible: Setbacks and Success in Politics and Life,” which was published last fall by Harper, an imprint of Harper Collins. Mr. Cuomo has received $565,000 over the last two years for his book, which, put politely, has not sold as well as some other political memoirs. According to Nielsen, which tracks 85 percent of print sales, the memoir — released in October, just before Mr. Cuomo’s election to a second term — had sold 3,000 hardcover copies as of Sunday. To date, that works out to approximately $188 per hardcover copy of “All Things Possible,” which runs for 499 pages, including its author’s note. (“I have spent many years studying, practicing, failing and succeeding,” the note reads, in part, “with profound highs and humiliating lows.”) More kindly computed, those sales, and that length, work out to the publisher paying Mr. Cuomo about 3 cents per printed page sold. Mr. Cuomo, who earns a salary of $179,000 as governor, was not the only politician pulling back financial curtains on Wednesday. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York and his wife, Chirlane McCray, declared adjusted gross income of about $217,000 for 2014, according to a return released by the mayor’s office. The pair earned more than $65,000 in rental income from two homes in Brooklyn. More than $56,000 came from a modest duplex once occupied by Mr. de Blasio’s mother. The de Blasios’ rowhouse down the street, where the family lived before moving to Gracie Mansion, was rented last year at $4,975 a month. But the tax return includes only two months of income, for November and December, and tallies $12,856 in expenses on the home — professional fees, mortgage interest and other costs. The family reported $63,444 in expenses on the second home, for an overall loss of over $7,000, after accounting for mortgage interest, depreciation and other costs. Mr. de Blasio’s salary is $225,000, and Ms. McCray is unpaid as chairwoman of the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, the city’s nonprofit arm. The de Blasios donated $7,215 to charity, roughly 3.3 percent of their income, approximately the same as 2013 in percentage terms. Causes included the Mayor’s Fund — directing money to the families of two police officers who were fatally shot in December — the Prospect Park Alliance and St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. For his part, Mr. Cuomo was gave $13,500 each to a pair of charities he is connected to: Help USA, a nonprofit organization he founded in the 1980s that provides help for the homeless; and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights, whose president is Kerry Kennedy, the governor’s former wife and the mother of his three daughters. | Andrew Cuomo;Bill de Blasio;Chirlane McCray;NYC;New York;Income tax;Books;Tax;All Things Possible |
ny0122224 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2012/09/29 | Romney Compares Obama Presidency to Carter’s | WASHINGTON — A president struggling simultaneously to cope with anti-American tumult in the Middle East and fix stubborn economic trouble at home: Is President Obama replaying the one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter ? So Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan have repeatedly suggested, trying to use the glum precedent of the Carter presidency to taint Mr. Obama’s record and produce the same electoral result 32 years later. The Republican candidates and their supporters have played the Carter card not nearly as often as the Obama team has brought up George W. Bush, who lurks near Mr. Carter in the lower ranks on historians’ ratings of American presidents. But they have pressed the Carter parallels all the harder since militants assaulted an American diplomatic mission in Libya and killed four Americans, saying it recalled the Iranian hostage crisis that dominated the news as Ronald Reagan ran his successful campaign against Mr. Carter. “I mean, turn on the TV and it reminds you of 1979 Tehran, but they are burning our flags in capitals all around the world, they are storming our embassies,” said Mr. Ryan, the Republican nominee for vice president, on a visit to Ohio on Monday. “We’ve lost four of our diplomats, and what is the signal that our government is sending the rest of the world?” In a campaign stop in Virginia in May, Mr. Romney said Mr. Obama was overseeing “the most anti-small business administration I’ve seen probably since Carter,” one of several campaign statements linking the current economic doldrums to the infamous “ stagflation ” of the late 1970s. Historians say the broad parallels between Mr. Carter’s term and Mr. Obama’s make for legitimate comparisons. But many of the details differ, and some tilt decisively in Mr. Obama’s favor, both factually and politically. And even some Republicans say that Mr. Obama’s greater personal popularity may mean the Carter label will not stick. Mr. Obama’s latest Gallup approval rating was near 50 percent; Mr. Carter’s was 37 percent in roughly the same period. “The big difference is personality,” said Frank J. Donatelli, a veteran Republican operative who helped run Mr. Reagan’s 1980 campaign against Mr. Carter and later served as political director in the Reagan White House. “Carter was dour, inward-looking, suspicious by nature,” he said. “Obama’s not. Despite presiding over a terrible economy, Obama has remained pretty popular personally.” Mr. Donatelli said he did see “weak foreign policy and economic mismanagement” as a valid criticism of both presidents. “What defeated Carter,” he said, “was the public’s sense that he couldn’t handle the job. That’s the point Romney and Ryan and are trying to make about Obama — that however nice a guy he may be, he’s in over his head.” Gerald M. Rafshoon, who served as communications director in the Carter White House, said Mr. Carter’s experience showed the hazards of a volatile world for an incumbent president. “All the advertising in the world can be rendered irrelevant because as an incumbent, you’re at the mercy of events,” he said. “The taking of an embassy was a symbol to Americans: ‘Why are we being pushed around by this third-rate power?’ ” On the surface, at least, the recent anti-American protests across the Muslim world do bear resemblance to those in Iran after 1979. Both came in the chaotic jostling for power that followed the overthrow of authoritarian leaders. But “America Held Hostage,” as ABC News called it in daily reports, dominated the news for more than a year. The standoff came to symbolize American helplessness and frustration. By contrast, the deaths of American diplomats in Libya are not a continuing crisis. In fact, they prompted thousands of Libyans to demonstrate in protest against the violence, especially the killing of the widely admired American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens. Mr. Obama has responded , in part, with tough talk, vowing at the United Nations on Tuesday to be “relentless in tracking down the killers and bringing them to justice.” Or consider the risky covert missions that will always define the two presidencies, and the undeniable role of luck in shaping a president’s image. Mr. Carter gave the orders for a daring mission in April 1980 to dispatch eight helicopters to rescue the American hostages; a sandstorm, mechanical problems and a fiery collision resulted in disastrous failure, with eight servicemen dead and no hostages freed. Mr. Obama, of course, approved his own covert helicopter operation — and its risks were underscored when one helicopter crashed. But the operation ended in triumph, with Osama bin Laden dead and all members of the SEAL team safe. Mr. Obama began his presidency by reaching out to Iran and gave a tempered response when the pro-democracy Green Movement protests broke out there in 2009 — a position the Romney campaign has seized on to accuse the president of “projecting weakness.” But the case for weakness runs up against Mr. Obama’s record when it comes to the targeted killing of terrorism suspects, with hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. On Iran, administration officials point to tough sanctions and the president’s vow not to permit the country to obtain a nuclear weapon. David Patrick Houghton, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida and author of a book on the Iran hostage crisis, said the Carter comparisons were “mostly unfair” — both to Mr. Carter and Mr. Obama. He singled out as “utterly false” Mr. Romney’s claim that Mr. Reagan’s tough reputation caused Iran to release the American hostages just as he became president; in fact, the Carter administration had negotiated their release. “This campaign has become a kind of opportunity to fling around bogus history,” he said. David Farber, a Temple University historian, said Mr. Obama appeared to have learned from Mr. Carter’s mistakes Notably, the president has avoided any echo of Mr. Carter’s famous 1979 speech about a “crisis of confidence” that he said had struck “at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” While well received initially, it became a political millstone for Mr. Carter, who was accused of blaming the public for the country’s troubles. “Rhetorically, Obama hasn’t fallen into that trap,” Mr. Farber said. Mr. Farber said the economy was getting worse in 1980, with the complication of inflation on top of high unemployment. However slowly, it appears to be improving today, making it less devastating to Mr. Obama’s campaign. But Mr. Farber pointed to image as the bottom line. Both men were “outsiders” when they reached the White House, he said. “But Obama turned that outsider quality into a kind of steely leadership,” he said. “For all his gifts, Carter was never able to do that.” | Presidential Election of 2012;Obama Barack;Carter Jimmy;United States International Relations;Romney Mitt |
ny0054680 | [
"business",
"international"
] | 2014/07/24 | The Number That Many French Businesses Fear | ÉGUILLES, France — Philippe Plantier, a seasoned French mountaineer, was rappelling down a cliff more than a decade ago when the inspiration struck: He could turn his passion for climbing into a business. Starting from his garage, he opened a small firm in the heart of Provence that now does a brisk local business on vertiginous industrial structures, with rappellers painting suspension bridges or belaying over mammoth nuclear cooling towers. There are few heights to which Mr. Plantier and his workers will not ascend. But there is one number he refuses to go above: 49. When his employee head count reached that figure, he stopped hiring. Taking on a 50th person would unleash nearly three dozen French labor regulations that he estimates would cause operating costs for his company, Travaux Grande Hauteur, to rise by about 4 percent. That could mean the difference between making and losing money, he says, in a business whose profit margins are as thin as his climbers’ margin for error. So in a tactic used by hundreds of other employers in a country with some of the European Union’s most extensive labor requirements, he has sought to conquer by dividing. Rather than expand his company, he set up a second, and then a third, all capping the work force at fewer than 49 employees. Like-minded business owners are the reason France holds the curious distinction of having more than twice as many companies with exactly 49 employees, as it does those with 50 or more. Economists say France’s 50-plus labor rules, which require employers to implement stringent and costly job protections — including a workers’ council with labor union delegates, a health and safety committee, and annual collective bargaining — are one reason the eurozone’s second-largest economy runs an unemployment rate more than twice Germany’s. Worker councils do exist in various forms in some other European Union countries, including Spain, where employers also say the additional costs from having more than 50 employees discourages business expansion. In the United States, businesses do not face as many workplace regulations, but their costs do tend to rise after the 50th employee, mainly because of additional health care obligations. But in France, because of the potential for union activism and a multitude of other additional regulations, crossing the 50-employee threshold is seen as particularly onerous. “The idea was not to pass 50,” Mr. Plantier, a wiry, energetic man, said as muscled workers wielding climbing gear bustled about. “In France, regulations and costs become almost overwhelming once your company reaches a certain size. It’s a disincentive to hire, and it holds the country back.” “France must reform,” said Jacques Attali, an adviser to French governments and the author of a landmark 2008 report on the French labor market, which warned that the thresholds stunt growth and employment. “If not, we will all be singing while the ship goes down.” With the economy stagnant, President François Hollande has sought to avoid that outcome. Recently, he sought to encourage hiring by trimming the country’s 3,200-page labor code, in part by making it easier for companies to shed workers or cut pay and working hours during downturns. This month, he went further and proposed lifting or temporarily suspending the 50-plus set of obligations to stoke job creation. But as Mr. Hollande toils under the lowest opinion-poll rankings ever for a French president, he risks a clash with some members of his Socialist party and powerful labor organizations. When he recently held a conference in Paris to address unemployment, the two main unions — the Confédération Générale du Travail and Force Ouvrière — boycotted it. They assailed the threshold reform plan as an effort to weaken collective worker representation, saying there was no proof firms would create more jobs under a deal. Employers had already broken pledges to set hiring targets in exchange for 30 billion euros, or $40.5 billion, in payroll tax breaks, Thierry Lepaon, the general secretary of the C.G.T., said at the time. Raising the employee ceiling would dilute trade union rights and employers’ responsibilities, dealing “an unprecedented blow to democracy and to social democracy in particular,” he said. Proponents say the 50th-worker threshold is meant to protect employees and give them some say in managing the company. The workers’ council can object, for instance, if bosses are thought to be spending money inefficiently, or flouting workers’ rights. Image Tanguy Roelandts, left, the founder of Puyricard, a maker of luxury chocolates, said that passing the 50-employee mark added substantially to the company's annual operating costs. Credit Nanda Gonzague for The New York Times “Workers’ councils can be good because they allow personnel representatives to help change the economic situation of the enterprise,” said David Askienazy, a partner at AM+DA, a French employment consulting practice. “If this relationship is well managed, it can help the boss understand employees’ concerns better.” But employers say the requirements also hurt business. A 2012 study by the London School of Economics showed that the cost of additional rules for 50-plus companies in France was equivalent to about a 5 to 10 percent increase in wages. “There is a strong disincentive to grow,” the study concluded. Half an hour north of Éguilles, Tanguy Roelandts, the founder of Puyricard, a maker of luxury French chocolates, faced such challenges when his business started booming a decade ago. He enlarged staff, training employees in the artisanal methods of handmade bonbons, calissons and other confections. The firm was like a family, he said, with annual sales of about €10 million. But after he hired his 50th employee, “it didn’t go well,” Mr. Roelandts said. The change added about €32,000 to Puyricard’s annual operating costs, and Mr. Roelandts said he wound up spending half his time dealing with administrative issues and state bureaucracy. Recently, for example, the government required him to calculate how much chocolate he could ration for France in case of a war, a task that took days. “That’s 50 percent of my time spent trying to apply rules that don’t advance the business, and that detract me from finding new products and markets,” he said. But the biggest problem came when Mr. Roelandts created the works council, which French employers have long argued can raise workplace tensions in a country where unions often strike, and have even held bosses captive to prevent layoffs. Although none of his employees were unionized, Mr. Roelandts said, unions contacted Puyricard workers and enrolled them when he set up the council. “Suddenly we found ourselves in a brutal discourse, and the dialogue became very different,” he recalled. “It was a misfortune to have passed the 50 mark,” he added, though he said he had come too far to scale back. “Let’s be clear,” Mr. Roelandts continued. “The situation in France has become so complex, that many company owners decide not to grow. They get to 50 people and say, That’s enough.” Back in Éguilles, Mr. Plantier said there was ample reason to keep payroll below 50 at each of his work sites. “In France, there is this image of the boss as a thug, and if he’s successful, it’s because he’s exploited workers,” Mr. Plantier said. Eschewing a union-led workers’ council could avoid such tension in a small firm where he had worked closely with employees for years, he reasoned. Of course, he said, it was hardly efficient to run three separate operations, instead of having all of his employees on one payroll. “Splitting it up complicates management, organization and a whole lot of other things,” said Mr. Plantier, who set up two annexes elsewhere in Provence, so far with 15 employees in each, by registering them under slightly different company names. Occasionally, he said, his organization has lost business because it cannot assign enough workers at various sites to meet demand. “Employees will say, we have a lot of orders, we need to hire more. And I tell them we can’t,” Mr. Plantier said. “They accept it, but they say it’s a shame.” Today, Mr. Plantier said, many French companies have taken the same route he has. “Unless things change,” he said, “France will be left behind while the world passes us by.” | France;Small business;Regulation and Deregulation |
ny0071714 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2015/03/21 | 5 Babies Found Dead in French Village | PARIS — The bodies of five babies, including four hidden in a freezer, were discovered in a house in southern France after a man told the police he had found the corpse of a baby in a cooler bag in his home, a senior police official said Friday. The official, Christophe Crépin, a spokesman for the UNSA police union, said the discovery of the babies’ bodies came to light on Thursday when the man, a 40-year-old farmer, contacted the police after he discovered a newborn’s body in an isothermal bag at his family’s home in Louchats, a rural village about 30 kilometers south of Bordeaux. After the police searched the home, they discovered four other corpses of babies in a large freezer, he said. Mr. Crépin said the man had been detained and was being questioned by the police, while his wife, age 35, had been taken to the hospital to undergo psychological and gynecological examinations. The couple have two daughters ages 13 and 15. The police said they were still investigating the mysterious deaths and were considering several possibilities, including whether infanticide had been committed, whether the babies had been stillborn, or whether the mother had been suffering from a condition in which women deny they are pregnant. Agence France-Presse reported that the initial findings of the investigation appeared to suggest that the mother, who worked at a garden nursery, had given birth to a baby alone in the couple’s house. It said the woman had been seen by neighbors in their sleepy village as recently as three weeks ago and did not appear pregnant. News reports said the man had told the police that he had not known his wife was pregnant. It is not the first time that France has been shaken by the discovery of dead babies. In 2010, the bodies of eight newborn babies were found buried in the garden of a home in Villers-au-Tertre, in the north of France. Their mother, Dominique Cottrez, told the authorities that she had killed them because she believed they were the product of incest. That followed a case in 2006 when Jean-Louis Courjault, a French engineer who was living in Seoul, South Korea, discovered the corpses of two newborn babies in his freezer. His wife, Véronique Courjault, was sentenced in June 2009 to eight years in prison for killing three of her babies, and was freed in May 2010. The police said that autopsies would be carried out on the Louchats bodies on Friday. | France;Babies;Child Abuse |
ny0021353 | [
"sports",
"golf"
] | 2013/09/11 | With Hours of Practice and a Little Flour on Her Face, Park Grew Into a Star | MOUNT DORA, Fla. — Inbee Park was 10 when she rose from her bed in the middle of the night back home in Seoul to watch her South Korean compatriot Se Ri Pak win the 1998 United States Women’s Open on television. Three years later, Park, her sister, Inah, and their mother, Sung, packed up and moved to the United States while their father, Gun Gyu, stayed home to run his business. The Parks settled here in this suburb north of Orlando with fewer than 13,000 residents, where the girls went to school and learned English. Inbee had just turned 13 and was budding as a golfer in 2001. Inah was starting to play at 11. They were enrolled in a golf academy for South Koreans run by Charlie Yoo at Black Bear Golf Club in nearby Eustis. Inbee progressed quickly. “When she won the 2002 U.S. Girls’ Junior championship and came back home to Mount Dora, I had her autograph some golf balls for me,” said David Reed, whose wife, Jeannie, was Park’s English teacher and golf coach at Christian Home and Bible School, a private school with 550 students. “I said, ‘Inbee, you know this is just the beginning, don’t you?’ ” he said. “She just smiled.” After two and a half years in Mount Dora, the Park family moved to Las Vegas, where Inbee began fine-tuning her game at the Butch Harmon School of Golf. She turned professional at 17, posting 11 top-10 finishes on the 2006 Futures Tour (now the Symetra Tour). “I don’t want to go to the L.P.G.A. Tour and just make cuts and never win,” she said in 2006, when she finished No. 3 among the Futures Tour’s money winners and qualified for the L.P.G.A. Tour. “I want to be the best player in the world someday.” Park’s career took another leap in 2008 when, at 19, she won the United States Women’s Open, her first victory as a professional. Now 25, she is the world’s top-ranked female player. Image Inbee Park in a yearbook photograph from Christian Home and Bible, a school in Florida. Credit Brian Blanco for The New York Times This year, Park won the tour’s first three majors — the Kraft Nabisco, the L.P.G.A. Championship and the United States Women’s Open — then tied for 42nd in the British Open. If she wins the Evian Championship this weekend in France, she will become the first L.P.G.A. player with four major tournament victories in a calendar year. Yet Park is still remembered for her youthful dedication to the game at Black Bear Golf Club, where she, her sister and four South Korean boys took lessons from Yoo and practiced six days a week. “From the pro shop, I could see the range,” said Rafe Kirian, who was Black Bear’s pro shop manager at the time. “And every time I looked out there, Inbee was either on the range or on the putting green.” “She hit close to a thousand balls a day, and chipped and putted for two to three hours,” Kirian added. “It was very businesslike, with the same beautiful rhythm and swing tempo that she still has.” A typical day for young Inbee would be to go to school, then head to Black Bear and practice with Yoo and her school team until dark. Jeannie Reed tutored the Park girls in English at their home several nights a week. “Inbee had lots of golf trophies at their house,” Reed said, “but she downplayed it and called them ‘pieces of glass.’ She was more proud of showing me her room, her puppy or sharing her mom’s Korean food.” Kirian said he put up a large sign in the Black Bear pro shop after Park won the 2002 United States Girls’ Junior that read, “We’re proud of you, Inbee!” When she walked into the clubhouse and saw the sign, he said, she blushed and hugged him as he put a Black Bear Golf Club cap on her head. Image Inbee Park’s former golf coach at Christian Home and Bible School, Jeannie Reed, left, and two ex-teammates, Sara Hill, center, and Lauren Smith. Credit Brian Blanco for The New York Times “I met great people there and got great energy from them, which helped a lot,” Park said recently by e-mail. In the fall of 2003, the Park sisters helped their school advance to the state high school golf championship for the first time. When the team finished third, Inbee was disappointed but the rest of the squad was ecstatic, Reed said. “We wouldn’t have been there if it weren’t for Inbee,” said Lauren Brown Smith, who was also on the team. “But she never made us feel bad for not being golf all-stars.” Another former teammate, Sara Hill, said, “We took the game seriously, but we also knew we weren’t going to play college golf or go on to the L.P.G.A. Tour.” “Inbee showed us complete and total dedication, and she worked her butt off to get where she is now,” added Hill, the new girls’ golf coach at Christian Home and Bible School. “She didn’t just ride her talent.” Hill and Smith were able to coax some uncharacteristic silliness from Park after the state championship. For a team photograph, the girls formed a pyramid, with Inbee and Inah laughing on the bottom. The day after the state championship, Hill began basketball practice and Smith started cheerleading. Inbee and Inah returned to their routine on the range at Black Bear. (Inah recently graduated from the University of Southern California, where she played on the golf team for four years.) Image Rafe Kirian, the former pro shop manager at Black Bear Golf Club, where Inbee Park played. Credit Brian Blanco for The New York Times Reed recalled driving back from the next year’s state tournament with the Park sisters in her car. The girls enjoyed contemporary Christian music, she said, and sang along with a CD on the way home. Reed once invited the Park sisters to her house to help make Christmas cookies. She remembered that they were happy and singing, with flour on their faces. “When I took them home, they ran through the front door giggling, with cookies for their mother,” Reed said. “I remember she smiled and said, ‘You’ve turned them into American girls!’ ” By then, Park’s prowess as a golfer had received national attention and put a spotlight on Christian Home and Bible. “Inbee is the biggest star to come out of this school,” Dr. James Moore, the school’s president, said. “Other students knew who the sisters were and hoped they would do great things with their talent.” Although Inbee Park keeps in touch with the Reeds by e-mail, there is no indication that she ever attended Christian Home and Bible School or played at Black Bear Golf Club. The course has changed management several times, and the association with Park has been lost except for Kirian’s memories. Moore said the school hoped to erect a permanent sign on campus with the inscription, “First U.S. Home of Inbee Park.” She has not been back to Mount Dora, but people here are cheering her quest to make L.P.G.A. history. “We feel honored that Inbee was in our lives, and we’ll never forget her,” said Reed, who retired in July. “Our time with her was a lot of fun.” | Golf;Inbee Park;South Korea |
ny0210644 | [
"world",
"americas"
] | 2009/12/25 | Rafael Caldera, Ex-President of Venezuela, Dies at 93 | CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Rafael Caldera, who served two terms, 20 years apart, as president of Venezuela , and who issued a pardon that paved the way for Hugo Chávez to rise to power, died here on Thursday. He was 93. His death was announced by Andrés Caldera, his son. Mr. Caldera was one of the three signers of the Punto Fijo pact, which organized democratic elections after the fall of the dictator Gen. Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958. Under that agreement, Mr. Caldera’s center-right party, Copei, and Rómulo Betancourt’s Democratic Action Party shared power for nearly 40 years. Born in 1916 in the northwestern state of Yaracuy, Mr. Caldera entered politics in the 1930s after obtaining a political science degree at the Central University of Venezuela. He founded Copei in 1946. Mr. Caldera was president of Venezuela from 1969 to 1974, and again from 1994 to 1999. During his first term he eliminated the remnants of leftist guerrilla movements by granting their members a general amnesty. That period was also marked by lavish government spending on public works and a growing bureaucracy. Two decades later, with Venezuela in turmoil after two failed military coup attempts and the impeachment of President Carlos Andrés Pérez on corruption charges, Mr. Caldera won a new term in 1993 without the backing of Copei, breaking the power-sharing pact he had helped create. He soon confronted the nation’s worst banking crisis, in which half of Venezuelan banks failed. He addressed the crisis by imposing price and currency exchange controls. Mr. Caldera led the country through a period of relative stability. He also granted an amnesty to the man behind one of the coup attempts: Mr. Chávez, who in 1998 would succeed him as president. The two were later at odds. In a 2003 newspaper interview, Mr. Caldera warned that violence could ensue if Mr. Chávez, using state resources, blocked efforts to hold a recall referendum on his presidency. Mr. Caldera also questioned the legitimacy of the new Constitution under which Mr. Chávez has increased his power. Mr. Chávez responded that Mr. Caldera’s comments “reflect the depths of desperation” opponents to his government had reached. He blamed Mr. Caldera and others for creating a corrupt system that left millions of Venezuelans in poverty. Mr. Caldera’s son said the family “will not accept any homage from the government of Hugo Chávez.” | Caldera Rafael;Politics and Government;Venezuela;Deaths (Obituaries) |
ny0066594 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2014/06/13 | Kentile Floors Sign, a Stalwart Remnant of a Grittier Brooklyn, Will Get a New Home | It is confirmed: The Kentile Floors sign in Brooklyn is coming down. But the majestic 50-year-old icon will be saved, said City Councilman Brad Lander, who helped broker the deal. And it will be reinstalled nearby. The owner of the warehouse building beneath the sign, Elyahu Cohen, has agreed to donate it to a neighborhood nonprofit group, the Gowanus Alliance, which will find a new home for it. The sign has been the subject of a sudden preservation campaign since news of its possible demolition broke last week. “Everyone would love to see the sign right where it is,” Mr. Lander said Thursday. “But given the structural conditions and the needs of the owner and his legal rights, we’re very grateful that he’s willing to bear the extra cost to preserve the letters and donate them.” The sign, which marks a defunct flooring company and towers eight stories above the factories and scrapyards by the Gowanus Canal, has become an aesthetic totem in recent years: a symbol of Brooklyn’s industrial heritage and one of the most photographed pieces of architecture in the city. Last week, it was revealed that Mr. Cohen had received permits to demolish the sign. Workers erected scaffolding around it, but no one would confirm whether the plan was to take it down. Within hours, a “Save Our Sign” campaign was started. Protesters rallied nearby. On Tuesday, Mr. Lander said, he met with Mr. Cohen, who explained that the sign’s steel structure was rusting and crumbling and needed to be scraped and repainted. The building beneath the sign was itself damaged by Hurricane Sandy, and needed work, Mr. Lander said Mr. Cohen told him. Mr. Lander said Mr. Cohen told him that doing all the work needed to preserve the sign would be too costly to be worthwhile. Mr. Cohen, who operates a textile company in the building, at 111 Ninth Street, would not comment directly, but said in a statement: “We love the sign, and we heard the voices of so many community members. We will work hard to preserve the letters during removal.” There are some hurdles to clear. The permits require that the 20-foot-high letters be reduced to four-by-four-foot sections and sent down a debris chute off the roof. Mr. Lander said that while contractors had yet to inspect the letters, he was hopeful that they would come apart into segments, which is probably how they were hauled up to the roof in the first place, he speculated. For the letters to come down safely, they would probably need to be lowered with pulleys, not crammed down a chute, Mr. Lander said. “Maybe we’ll have to talk to the Buildings Department and see if it is permissible to lower them by pulley and be preserved,” he said. Paul Basile, founder of the Gowanus Alliance , which is made up of property and business owners in the area, said his group would work with the community to preserve the letters and “find a marvelous location for their eventual re-installation, where they can serve the public and be part of the future of Gowanus.” | Kentile Floors;Brad Lander;Gowanus Brooklyn;Brooklyn;Signage;Historic preservation |
ny0293723 | [
"us"
] | 2016/06/09 | One Person Killed in Shooting Near High School in Boston | One person was killed and three others were injured in a shooting near a high school in the Dorchester neighborhood on Wednesday afternoon, the Boston Police Department said. The Boston police commissioner, William Evans, said that the person who was killed was a 17-year-old student at Jeremiah E. Burke High School. Myeshia Henderson, a spokeswoman for the department, said that two other people, both in their late teens, had suffered injuries that were not life-threatening. A woman in her 60s was treated for a graze wound at the scene, Ms. Henderson said. At an afternoon news conference, Commissioner Evans said the police were canvassing the neighborhood door to door in a search for the suspect or suspects. Asked if the shooting was gang-related, Mr. Evans said it was too early to tell. “We don’t know if it was a fight that was spilled out,” he said. “Kids don’t fight anymore with their hands, they run and get weapons.” Mayor Martin J. Walsh, standing with Mr. Evans, said that trauma counselors would be sent into the school Thursday to help students and teachers cope with what happened. “The victim is too young to be gunned down at the middle of the daytime, and the community is sick and tired of the shootings,” Mayor Walsh said. Ali Guevara, 18, a senior at the school, was at a Burger King nearby when the shooting took place. She said that she heard shots, and that a friend told her the shooting took place after someone at the school pulled a fire alarm, an account repeated by several other students to local television reporters. Mr. Evans said he understood that a fire alarm had been pulled at the school but had “no clue” whether it was related to the shooting. | Murders and Homicides;School Shootings and Attacks;Boston |
ny0119891 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2012/07/19 | Federal Government Signs Lease for 1 World Trade Center | The federal government announced on Wednesday that it would become the third tenant of 1 World Trade Center . As a result, more than half of the space inside the fast-rising tower has now been leased. The government will occupy six levels of the new 104-story building, Floors 50 to 55. The initial lease starts in 2015 and will last 20 years, said Renee Miscione, a spokeswoman for the General Services Administration , which acts as the government’s real estate broker and signed the lease. It is not yet known which agencies will occupy the space, though Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for the Durst Organization , which manages the building, said it would not house law enforcement agencies and might house the G.S.A. itself. Possible tenants include government agencies with leases in the New York area that are expiring. The announcement adds extra symbolic resonance to the tower. Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal government was a major presence at the World Trade Center site, occupying almost all of 6 World Trade Center, an 8-story building, and 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story building. One World Trade Center now stands atop the site of the former 6 World Trade Center, which was demolished after being heavily damaged in the attacks. “There’s been a long-term relationship between the World Trade Center site and the federal government, and the G.S.A.’s commitment to 1 World Trade, we think, renews and extends that relationship,” said Patrick J. Foye, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the project’s developer and owner. The tenants of the demolished 6 World Trade Center included the United States Customs Service; the Agriculture, Commerce and Labor Departments; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and the Peace Corps. Seven World Trade Center, which collapsed on Sept. 11, housed offices for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and the Secret Service. The building is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2013 or the start of 2014. Mr. Barowitz said Durst had been in talks with potential tenants from the financial services, advertising, legal and technology industries to lease the rest of the tower. | 1 World Trade Center (NYC);Renting and Leasing (Real Estate);General Services Administration;Durst Organization;United States Politics and Government;Real Estate (Commercial);New York City |
ny0203544 | [
"business",
"global"
] | 2009/08/08 | Canada Questions ‘Buy America’ | OTTAWA — Before coming here on a visit in February, President Obama assured anxious Canadians in a television interview that the United States’ trading partners had nothing to fear from the “Buy America” provisions in federal stimulus bills. But now that the stimulus money is flowing, many Canadian companies are finding that, despite the president’s assurances, the North American Free Trade Agreement does not in fact offer them much protection. Charles A. Cartmill buys about half of the components he uses to make streetlamps based on energy-efficient light-emitting diodes from American companies. But the Buy America provisions have still made the lamps from his company, LED Roadway Lighting, increasingly unwelcome in the United States. “We’ve had contractors call and say that they want certificates that everything is from the U.S.,” Mr. Cartmill said from Halifax, Nova Scotia. “It will definitely cost us business.” Mr. Cartmill’s case is not isolated, particularly among companies that make the parts used to build the infrastructure of American cities. Citing provisions in legislation that has flowed from the initial recovery act, United States cities, states and contractors are telling Canadian companies that their pipes, water pumps and electrical equipment are no longer on United States shopping lists. Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, a trade group, estimates that about 250 companies have been affected to date. While the dispute has attracted relatively little notice in the United States, it has reopened the debate in Canada about the value of Nafta and the trustworthiness of the United States as a trade partner. On Friday, the premiers of Canada’s 10 provinces concluded a meeting by urging the federal government to confront the United States over the issue. They will not have to wait long for satisfaction. A spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Friday that Buy America would be on the agenda when two days of meetings among him, Mr. Obama and President Felipe Calderón of Mexico begin in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Sunday. “No country should add any protectionist measures to what they are doing,” Stockwell Day, Canada’s international trade minister, said in a recent interview. “Congress should realize that they are risking retaliatory actions from Canada. Retaliatory trade measures always end up with both sides getting hurt.” Buy America provisions have been popular with organized labor, including United States-based unions like the United Steelworkers of America, which also have members in Canada. But they have not been met with the same enthusiasm by many businesses. In a submission to the Office of Management and Budget, the Chamber of Commerce of the United States said that the measure was effectively blocking American companies from bidding on infrastructure work because they have global operations, including branches in Canada. Canada and the Chamber of Commerce agree that the problem is not at the federal level. On the whole, it appears that federal departments and agencies are honoring a portion of the Buy America clause that exempts products from 38 countries, including Canada, that hold trade agreements with the United States. Canada’s problems, however, stem from state and local government projects financed by stimulus money from the federal government. The problems are twofold. Many state and local governments are not directly covered under Nafta or by the World Trade Organization agreements, although 37 states have agreed to the provisions of the international agreement. On top of that, provisions inserted in authorization bills for the disbursal of stimulus money on specific types of projects have left those lower-level governments thinking that any supplies they purchase using federal money must be entirely American. “The message, as municipalities and states are hearing it, is: make sure Canada doesn’t bid on stimulus programs or you won’t get the funds,” Mr. Day said. There is, however, a twist that is often overlooked during the debate in Canada. No municipal or provincial governments in Canada are bound by international trade agreements, and many of them have discriminated against foreign companies when making purchases. The current feud with the United States has prompted a small number of Canadian municipalities to take advantage of their legal position to engage in their own form of trade retaliation. Haywood Gordon, which is based in the Toronto suburb of Halton Hills, Ontario, found that Buy America had all but eliminated the government market in the United States for its products, which include pumps used in sewage systems. In response, the local government in Halton Hills now boycotts products from any country that discriminates against Canadian exporters. In June, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities passed a similar resolution, although it delayed its effective date for several months. In an attempt to strengthen Canada’s case, Mr. Day wants Canada’s provinces — which also hold power over local governments — to formally agree to open their purchasing to foreign companies. Unions, including the Canadian Auto Workers, have urged the provinces to resist. The premiers apparently failed to reach a common position at their meeting this week. In theory, Canadian companies can apply for waivers to make it clear to local governments and their contractors that their products do not violate the Buy America rules. But Mr. Cartmill, the streetlight maker, has found that system generally unworkable. “For the most part, municipalities are not going to go through the trouble of getting some kind of ruling,” he said, adding that deadlines for stimulus financing applications make the problem more acute. The Chamber of Commerce in Washington has formally asked the budget office to tell municipal and state governments that they are not permitted to discriminate against suppliers from Canada and other American trade partners on projects financed with federal stimulus money. “Rational people could make an argument that it’s federal money flowing down,” said Chris Braddock, the senior director of procurement policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce. The Canadian government is also pressing Congress and the Obama administration for an explicit exemption on state and local projects. Some Canadian trade analysts are concerned that any effort to clarify Canada’s position may be blocked by members of Congress who do not want to be perceived as opposing Buy America. Others worry that by the time that Canada gets its way, the stimulus money will have largely been spent. Mr. Day, however, is optimistic about a resolution to the trade dispute. “It may be unintended consequences,” he said of situation surrounding state and local projects. “But they are consequences nonetheless.” | International Trade and World Market;Canada;American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009);United States Economy;North American Free Trade Agreement;Obama Barack |
ny0018406 | [
"us"
] | 2013/07/11 | Mining Death Rate at All-Time Low | Mining operations in the United States had the lowest death and injury rates in their history last year with 36 on-the-job fatalities, federal regulators said Wednesday. The final figures also show the lowest rate of contractor deaths since the agency began tracking them in 1983, it said. Five contractors died last year, down from 11 the previous year. About 100 fewer coal mines were in operation last year, and the number of working miners fell from a decades-long high of 143,437 in 2011 to 137,650 last year. But the agency said that was still the second-highest year for mining employment since 1984. The agency’s director, Joe Main, credits the improvements to tougher enforcement measures and to actions taken by industry. | Mining;Accidents and Safety;Fatalities,casualties;US |
ny0127449 | [
"technology"
] | 2012/01/09 | Tech Show Loses Clout as the Place for Product News | The International Consumer Electronics Show , which will open on Tuesday in Las Vegas, is impossible to ignore. It will smother the city’s gigantic convention center with gadgets and those who make and promote them; more than 140,000 people are expected to attend for a frenzy of old-fashioned social networking with other members of the tech set. But once again, the show is unlikely to be where any blockbuster products of 2012 are introduced. Many of the hottest new gadgets in recent years — including Apple’s iPad and iPhone , Microsoft ’s Kinect and Amazon’s Kindle Fire — were first announced at other events, even though C.E.S. remains the world’s biggest consumer technology convention. This reflects the changing nature of the technology industry — particularly the fact that the most important developments in the electronics business are no longer coming from the makers of television sets and stereos that have been most closely identified with the show since it started in 1967. And as the industry and its trade show have grown, the need for buzz and branding has become more acute. The most innovative players — like Apple and Amazon — need to stand out from the crowd and so have chosen to introduce their products at smaller, more narrowly defined conferences and company-only events. In December, the significance of C.E.S. was further called into question when Microsoft said the 2012 show would be its last for exhibiting. Microsoft also said its chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, after this year would no longer deliver the opening night keynote address for the event, which a Microsoft executive has done 14 times since 1995. And executives at the wireless carriers are not delivering keynote speeches on their own this year, which means they too are unlikely to make big announcements at the show. “For the larger guys, the show has become less important,” said Phil McKinney, who retired recently as the chief technology officer for the computer division at Hewlett-Packard, which stopped having a booth at the show in 2009. “The challenge for C.E.S. is when you start losing more and more of these anchor-type brands, does it cause a tipping point?” Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association, the industry trade group that produces the show, said that he was sorry to see Microsoft’s departure, but that it would have little impact on the popularity of the show. The group said it was expecting more than 2,700 exhibitors at this week’s event, compared with 2,800 the year before, although it does not have a final number yet because it is still selling space. Attendance for the show last year was more than 149,000, but it’s too soon to tell whether this year will exceed that figure. Some companies that have stopped exhibiting on the floor still hold private meetings at the event because so many people attend it. In an interview, Mr. Shapiro said exhibitors come and go from the show all the time. He said C.E.S. has no rival in its ability to attract top-tier executives in the tech industry, media, retailers and others from the around the world. “C.E.S. is the dominant show in consumer technology by any measure,” he said. Mr. Shapiro disputed the idea that companies no longer make major news at the show, though he said the technology industry is so much larger than it once was that it is now in a “continuous news cycle” throughout the year. “We are very positive about C.E.S.,” said Hiral Gheewala, director of marketing at Intel, a big exhibitor at the show. There was a time, though, when it seemed that every major gadget had its debut at C.E.S., including the videocassette recorder in 1970, the camcorder in 1981 and the Xbox from Microsoft in 2001. While the show’s sheer scale — its exhibit space is more than 1.7 million square feet — makes it a desirable place to network, it also means news can easily get muffled. “It’s not the best place for product announcements,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research. “You get lost in all the noise.” Instead, companies like Apple and Amazon tend to hold their own product presentation where they can have a “captive audience all to themselves,” Ms. Rotman Epps said. The show is still important to many retailers, though, who either place orders or just get a look at new merchandise. But Apple and Amazon have brought changes to tech retailing because they sell directly to consumers. That has made them less dependent on the dwindling number of independent electronics retailers like Best Buy, which reported flat sales during December. The timing of the show has also been a sore point for a number of technology companies, including Microsoft, which said it was leaving the show in large part because its product milestones did not align with the show’s January timing. John MacFarlane, the chief executive of Sonos, a maker of wireless stereo systems, said announcing new products at the show would make customers who bought products during the holidays feel annoyed for missing out on the newest versions of its products. And sales usually do not pick up after the holidays until the back-to-school season begins in the summer. “Why would you ever release things just in front of the slowest six months of the year?” asked Mr. MacFarlane, who stopped exhibiting on the floor almost a decade ago. Still, like some of the technology companies that do not officially participate in the show, Sonos is seeking to capitalize on its popularity by conducting meetings at a hotel during the conference. Mr. Shapiro said the group routinely surveyed its exhibitors and “by far January is the preferred time for the show.” Companies that have stopped participating say the cost of having a meaningful presence at the show was a big factor in their decisions. In Microsoft’s case, the opening night keynote address was an added expense, involving large amounts of equipment, cameras and sometimes cameo appearances by celebrities. Producing the keynote event cost Microsoft close to $1 million each year, according to someone familiar with the event who wasn’t authorized to speak about it. The association had also indicated to Microsoft that it wanted to schedule a keynote speaker from another company on the opening night of next year’s show, which could have been perceived as a slight to the company after it held the spot for so many years. As he manages C.E.S., Mr. Shapiro said he is mindful of the fate of another conference, the computer-focused Comdex event, that discontinued its live events after 2003. During its heyday, Comdex became reviled within the technology industry for charging what were seen as exorbitant mark-ups on everything from floor space to fees for unloading trucks with equipment, something the electronics association does not do, he said. “They extracted as much money as possible from their customers,” he said. “It was a case study of short-term thinking.” | International Consumer Electronics Show;Conventions Fairs and Trade Shows;Electronics;Computers and the Internet;Microsoft Corporation |
ny0141439 | [
"sports",
"playmagazine"
] | 2008/11/02 | The Next Big Thing | The lightning arrives in great, thwapping bursts, and the night sky over New York City is a series of bright fissures. The world outside Renardo Sidney’s hotel looks gorgeously broken. Inside, Sidney is sitting in a gloomy nook, tapping distractedly on his Sidekick. He is one of the best young basketball players in the land, an 18-year-old with a molten game whose career, though he is not yet out of high school, has already become a morality play about the state of contemporary basketball. He is 6-foot-10 and about 270 pounds. In two years, maybe less, he will be a well-paid professional basketball player, and perhaps at that time, too, he will shrug his massive shoulders when he is asked why he still sucks his thumb. “I’ve been sucking my thumb since I was a kid,” he says. “Sometimes, I do it just to do it. Like, when I’m mad.” He also travels with a lucky blanket. His father — Renardo the elder — is seated across the table. He chuckles. “It’s a sheet,” he clarifies. Renardo Jr. is large in ways you don’t often see in people his age, less like a heavyset teenager rounding slowly into shape than a longtime athlete who has spent his off-season at the buffet. He has always been big, though, starting at birth. As his father recalls, even the doctor said damn. By middle school, he stood 6 feet 5 inches tall, but he had yet to outgrow his old compulsions. One of his coaches, Trent Hysten, used to kid him: “You look just like a big baby. Get your thumb outta your mouth.” Sidney is frequently called a man-child, but maybe the most precocious thing about him is the already long arc of his career. Next spring, he will finish his senior year having attended three high schools in two states and having played for three summer travel teams since 2005. A nationally known quantity since before his eighth-grade year in Jackson, Miss., where his middle school charged $3 admission to his games, Sidney was considered the best player in America in his class by the time he reached high school. Some had penciled him in as the top pick in the 2010 N.B.A. draft . “They were talking about him being the next Magic Johnson,” says Tom Konchalski, an influential talent scout. From the beginning, however, Sidney represented a different sort of high school star, in part because, strictly speaking, he wasn’t a high-school star. He didn’t even join a high-school team until his sophomore year, and caused a minor stir when he told The Washington Post that high-school ball is “not that important.” Of course, for Sidney, it wasn’t, but that’s not something a young player is supposed to say out loud. Instead, to the dismay of many scowling traditionalists, Sidney was almost wholly a product of the summer. He made his name in the demimonde of summer basketball: what the sneakers companies call grass-roots basketball and what most everyone else calls, in slightly misleading shorthand, A.A.U. basketball. (Many, but not all, of the events fall under the purview of the Amateur Athletic Union, a nonprofit that promotes and oversees amateur sports.) What they’re talking about is the ecosystem of shoe-company-sponsored summer traveling teams, shoe-company-sponsored summer tournaments and shoe-company-sponsored summer camps. It is a vast, roiling Dodge City of the hoops landscape, lying as it does outside the reach of high-school coaches and the regulatory arm of the N.C.A.A. — an unsavory world, in the popular imagination, of street agents and shoe boxes full of cash and chest-thumping 16-year-olds with Adidas stripes branded like bar codes on their foreheads. And largely for that reason, summer ball has become a catch-all symbol of basketball indulgence, blamed for everything from the death of the bounce pass to the corruption of America’s youth to the occasional failures of the grown men who represent USA Basketball on the international stage. It is something like basketball’s bad conscience. And it was in this system that Sidney thrived. “He blew up in A.A.U. basketball,” says Renardo Sr., who, until his contract expired recently, earned about $20,000 a year as a Reebok “consultant,” a job that mostly entailed shepherding his son to Reebok-sponsored events. In 2007, Renardo Sr. started his own grass-roots outfit, the L.A. Dream Team, sponsored by Reebok and coached by Renardo Sr. himself. (He also mentors kids and works as a sort of personal trainer for other aspiring basketball players.) By August, however, the start of Sidney’s senior year, things had gone awry. Having relocated to Los Angeles in 2006, he was now attracting interest from a variety of college teams — among them Memphis, U.C.L.A., Texas and Arizona State, according to recruiting scuttlebutt — and perhaps even entertaining the notion, as some loose gossip had it, of playing in Europe next year. But he had put on weight. He talked wistfully about going fishing and “getting away from basketball,” which made him sound more like a 38-year-old power forward on a second tour with the Clippers. Sidney fell in everyone’s esteem. Rivals.com, a prominent recruiting site that offers a national ranking of prospects, nearly bounced him out of its top 10. A handful of scouts even figured him for a bust. He is a “prima donna and has one of the worst attitudes that we’ve ever seen,” wrote Clark Francis, the editor of Hoop Scoop Online and a bigfoot on the recruiting scene, in a scathing evaluation of Sidney. By Francis’s lights, the kid with the thumb in his mouth had become the bogeyman of modern basketball. “As a matter of fact,” he wrote, “Sidney could be the poster boy for many of [the] things that are wrong with grass-roots basketball and is the perfect example of just how bad the sense of entitlement among many of the top players has become.” He seemed to be saying, remarkably, that an 18-year-old’s basketball career had gone irretrievably to pot. Some time ago, a series appeared in a newsletter under the title “Is Basket-Ball a Danger?” In it, several correspondents wrung their hands over the game’s miasmic influence on children, the unruly behavior it seemed to inspire. This is no doubt a familiar litany, especially to those who remember the moral panic that ensued in 2004 after Ron Artest and the Indiana Pacers decided to punch their way out of the Palace of Auburn Hills. The only surprise is the year the series ran: 1894. It has been Renardo Sidney’s misfortune, more than a century later, to find himself cast as the villain in the oldest story in basketball. The Sidneys are in New York City on this June weekend for a Nike-sponsored tournament called the Rumble in the Bronx, and the day has gone miserably for the L.A. Dream Team. The equipment manager apparently left the uniforms in Los Angeles, forcing the players to borrow jerseys from their New York rivals, the Juice All-Stars. Then the team van got lost, and the Dream Team arrived late to its second game of the day, against the New York Panthers. Renardo Sr. was further horrified to learn the game was being held in what he would later call “the dungeon,” a humid, windowless gym that effectively simulates what basketball might feel like if it were played in a blast shelter. The Rumble in the Bronx is a relatively minor event in the summer hoops multiverse. There are a handful of college coaches milling about, mostly local. Where other summer events have the air of an industry convention, with backslapping reunions and furtive side-room deal-making, this one, at least off the court, feels meandering and almost casual; it is early June, the preamble to A.A.U. ball’s long summer. The N.C.A.A. has worked assiduously to curb the influence of these tournaments. For years, this meant primarily a flurry of rules and recommendations, many designed to limit contact between college and summer coaches and to return the locus of the recruitment process to the high schools, where establishment coaches with better credentials could act as the key brokers between college and player. This spring, however, the N.C.A.A. and the N.B.A., with token participation from the A.A.U. and the shoe companies, upped the ante, announcing a five-year, $50 million effort to reform what the N.C.A.A.’s president, Myles Brand, called the “dysfunctional” world of youth basketball. Fundamentally, the idea is to seize control of the mechanism by which players like Renardo Sidney launch their careers. What reform actually entails is unclear, but the deal calls for the N.B.A. and the N.C.A.A. to each chip in $15 million, with another $20 million coming through joint-marketing ventures. The contributions will fund an as-yet-unnamed program that will offer an alternative structure for youth basketball. The N.C.A.A. News wrote, “The new structure is designed to negate the effects of third-party influences currently working the youth basketball environment,” by which it meant “people who may not have the player’s best interests at heart.” That this comes from the same groups that in 2005 cheered the adoption of the N.B.A.’s minimum-age rule, effectively forcing high-school stars to spend one year playing college basketball pro bono rather than leap directly to the N.B.A., is more than a little rich. The partnership was announced at the Final Four this year, and it was noted in passing that both Brand and the N.B.A.’s commissioner, David Stern, would prefer that the age rule be raised from 19 to 20, meaning most players would have to remain in college for two years. Colleges benefit tremendously from keeping the best players in apprenticeship for two years; the N.B.A., in turn, gets marketable commodities who’ve spent more time in the college star-making machinery, as well as proven players who aren’t being drafted purely on their potential. The traditional justification is that colleges produce better, more well-rounded citizens, though in fact one study has suggested that the opposite may be true. In 2005, Michael McCann, then an assistant professor at Mississippi College School of Law, looked at 84 recent N.B.A. player arrests. He found that 57 percent of the players arrested spent four years in college; only 4.8 percent had never gone to college, significantly less than the league-wide share of prep-to-pro players (8.3 percent). In fact, one might infer from the study that the less time a player spent in college, the less likely he was to get arrested. “The N.B.A. and the N.C.A.A. are entertainment vehicles. One pays you, one doesn’t,” says John (Sonny) Vaccaro, the 69-year-old godfather of summer basketball and the man who, in the employ of first Nike, then Adidas, then Reebok, rained shoe money on the basketball world and in so doing acquired so much clout that he is set to be portrayed by James Gandolfini — the guy who played Tony Soprano — in an HBO movie. Vaccaro walked away from Reebok in 2007 with two years left on his contract and now wanders the country as basketball’s angry prophet, barnstorming noisily against the N.C.A.A.’s tax-exempt status and the N.B.A.’s age rule. “One thing is constant,” he says. “One thing. The performers. The players. Without the players, neither of these entities can be multibillion-dollar businesses.” Greg Shaheen, the N.C.A.A. senior vice president who oversees Division I basketball, says that “95 percent of our revenue stream goes to educating young people. I’d be curious to know if those criticizing us put 95 percent of their money toward the education of young people.” The attacks on summer basketball typically also come wrapped in a lot of moralizing about the style of play. In particular, the reformers have made a fetish of “the fundamentals” — the stuff that, to hear them talk, apparently went out of fashion around the time Whitey Skoog left the N.B.A. and that now lies dead by the hand of Sonny Vaccaro and the summer game. It’s for lack of fundamentals that the Americans can barely keep up with those “team-first, back-to-basics foreigners,” as USA Today put it, and after the 2004 Olympics, the critics hung Team USA’s bronze medal around the summer game’s neck like a millstone. This is a preposterous argument to make now, during the ascendancy of LeBron James and the coronation of Kevin Garnett, both of whom cut their teeth in summer basketball and bypassed college ball entirely and both of whom are as fundamentally sound as anyone who passed through John Wooden’s bounce-pass academy at U.C.L.A. Nevertheless, this is maybe the most persistent charge lodged against grass-roots ball, and because the summer game is mostly coached by blacks and played almost entirely by black kids in a black idiom, it comes freighted with all sorts of odious insinuations. In 2006, George Raveling, the former coach at the University of Southern California, fired an oblique shot at summer basketball when he told USA Today, “N.B.A. teams are realizing it’s less risky to draft internationals because they’re more coachable, more socialized, have no posses and have not been Americanized.” The racial tinge of his comment was staggering, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Raveling was not only Nike’s grass-roots director but a black man, to whom Martin Luther King gave his original typewritten notes for his “I Have a Dream” speech. I ask Vaccaro about the attacks on the style of summer play. “Are you crazy?” Vaccaro says. “The style of play? What was the style of play in U.S.A.-Spain [the 2008 Olympic gold-medal game]? Tell me, where was the defense in United States-Spain? “I’m tired of that. I’m tired of the vilification of these kids,” he goes on. “It’s sinful. It’s ethnic cleansing. Street basketball to them has a connotation — they think street basketball is black. Well, they better hope it’s black, because the majority of players playing the game has been black since they allowed blacks to play.” Brian McCormick, a coach and trainer who self-published a book on youth-player development, suggests the real problem with summer ball is that it “creates a system of overtraining,” with players bouncing from the high-school season to the summer season and back again with little break. Sidney estimates he plays close to 100 games a year. “Players are going, going, going,” McCormick says. In many ways, Renardo Sidney’s game was built for grass-roots ball, which, because of its fast tempo and showcase nature, tends to reward versatility. Last year, The New York Times called him “the epitome of camp evolution.” But Sidney does not suffer from a lack of fundamentals. He has a clean flick-knife of a jumper, smooth from anywhere on the court. He has the ballhandling ability of someone a foot shorter and five years older, and there are a lot of tiny felicities to his play: touch passes and no-looks and footwork out of an Arthur Murray studio. His is a veteran’s game. In fact, it’s possible he appears too fundamentally sound, that he relies too much on the sort of deftness that won’t sustain him in college and the pros. At his size, at this level, elegance can look more like nonchalance. At the New York tournament, Sidney is arguably the best prospect in the gym, and there are plenty of glimpses of the player he has been celebrated for being, not to mention the player he might become. But he also has a maddening tendency to drift, and in a game against the Panthers, he hardly leaves a mark. Triple-teamed on offense and mostly inert and grabby on defense, he manages only a handful of points before fouling out with several minutes remaining. The rest of the team looks equally skittish and tentative, and L.A. loses by a dozen, dropping the squad to the Rumble’s second-tier silver bracket. Renardo Sr. leaves the court hurling insults over his shoulders at a ref: “You can’t foul out the No. 1 player in the country with 10 minutes left!” By the time I see the Sidneys back at their hotel later that evening, neither is in much of a mood to chat. Renardo Jr. rubs his knee warily and hovers over his phone, barely lifting his head to answer questions. Renardo Sr. is hoarse, still exercised over the tournament, the conditions, the cost. And then, of course, there are the refs. “You can’t just get these guys off the street or at a liquor store,” he says. Renardo Sr. is in his pajamas, and his eyes look a little rheumy. He is not a big man, or at least he doesn’t look it, sitting here next to his son, but he certainly has an outsize presence. He favors shades indoors and enormous, billowing T-shirts that have tigers on the front and hang down to his knees, making him look short-armed and skinny-legged; on each hand he wears a fat, gleaming bowling ball of a ring, spoils of a 2007 California Division III state championship won by Renardo and Renardo’s older brother Tacus while at Artesia High School in Los Angeles. In talking about his younger son’s career, Renardo Sr. occasionally slips into the first-person plural, in the way that agents often do. For instance, when talking about whether the family’s history with Reebok — the deal expired this summer — will influence his son’s shoe preference in the pros, he says: “We’re gonna be with anybody that got the most money. So if you see us with Ponys on” — Pony being a minor player in the shoe game — “you know Pony came over.” Later, when he mentions Renardo Jr.’s nickname, the Difference — a nickname no one else seems to use, by the way — you can almost see the shoe commercial dancing in his eyes. There are, by my count, 182 Reebok logos inside the gym on the small campus of Philadelphia University, the site of July’s Reebok All-American Camp, where Sidney makes an appearance. They are everywhere: on backboards, scorer’s tables, doors, wall pads, folding chairs. They’re affixed to the railing on the track high above the floor, nearly 100 of them encircling the gym. I don’t even bother counting the Reebok shoes and the Reebok uniforms and the Reebok pencils and the Reebok lanyards and the Reebok signs that some poor soul had to hang on lampposts all around campus. Reebok-Reebok-Reebok-Reebok-Reebok. With every repetition, the word seems stranger to the eye, and it occurs to me later that I have no idea what it means. As it happens, “reebok” is the Afrikaans rendering of “rhebok,” an antelope that reminded European settlers of a type of deer called the roebuck, a word that many years later could be found adjoined to the word “Sears.” These are heady connotations: imperialism and commerce. One hell of a give-and-go. I mention the logos to Christopher Rivers, Vaccaro’s successor as Reebok’s director of basketball. He seems flattered. “I’m gonna have someone else count ’em,” he says, adding that the placement is anything but haphazard. “Everything is done strategically,” he says. “There isn’t a place you can shoot a picture without getting a logo.” The origins of the camp go back to 1984, when, under Vaccaro’s midwifery, the ABCD Camp was born. It stood for Academic Betterment and Career Development, though no one ever used the full name, and depending on its creator’s allegiance, ABCD has been a Nike camp, a Converse camp, an Adidas camp and a Reebok camp, though it was always, above all, a Sonny Vaccaro camp. It was Vaccaro, a promoter of high-school all-star games, who first paid college coaches to outfit their teams in Nikes, Vaccaro who signed Michael Jordan to his first shoe deal, Vaccaro who hugged Kobe Bryant just moments after he was drafted. And as he moved from company to company, taking his camp with him, a new event would sprout up in ABCD’s place, the various camps and tournaments running concurrently. The basic aim never changed, however: to give scores of the nation’s best high-school players exposure in front of the finest college coaches in the country (and vice versa), and to bury those kids in a hail of shoe logos. “There’s never been anything in the history of amateur basketball as successful as the ABCD Camp,” Vaccaro says of his creation. “And for this [the players] are vilified. Summer basketball and summer camps, starting with the Nike camp, the ABCD Camp, have been the epitome of what basketball is.” Vaccaro is the first person to cop to the venality of the summer circuit. “It’s a cesspool, and we start the process,” he told the authors of “Raw Recruits,” a 1991 exposé of college-hoops recruiting. A few years later, he told The New York Times’s Robert Lipsyte that “what I’m doing is morally wrong. But it’s not in my power to stop it.” In the bizarre moral universe of basketball, summer basketball has the virtue of being honest, at least on occasion, about its wickedness. When I asked one A.A.U. coach, Damian Johnson, how one best goes about building a program, he talked nakedly of putting together “the best team money can buy.” (At the high end, a team, often set up as a charity, might get $100,000 from a sneaker company, tax-deductible, in addition to donations from a variety of benefactors who may or may not include college boosters and agents. That covers the costs of shipping a team around the country, as well as remuneration for the coach.) Every sport exploits its prodigies, but none seems to cause the vast and unceasing tut-tutting that summer basketball does. Two years ago, O. J. Mayo, the nation’s most coveted high-school player and maybe the purest product of the summer system to date, picked up the phone and called U.S.C.’s head coach, Tim Floyd, to whom he had never spoken and who thought so little of his chances to sign the superstar recruit that he hadn’t even sent Mayo a brochure. “Coach,” he said, according to one account, “this is O. J. Mayo. I’d like to come to your school.” When Floyd asked for Mayo’s phone number, he answered, “No. I’ll call you.” As Rodney Guillory, an associate of Mayo’s, had explained to Floyd, Mayo wanted to market himself for a year before the draft and decided Los Angeles was the best place to launch his brand. Mayo, in effect, was recruiting Floyd. When an ESPN investigation later alleged that Mayo had received cash and gifts from a “runner” for an N.B.A. agent, his saga became a handy symbol of the ultimate corruption of basketball. But what, in the end, was harmed besides some outdated notion of amateurism? Certainly not Mayo. He played a single season at U.S.C. and then, in June, was taken third in the N.B.A. draft. This summer, Vaccaro was instrumental in the decision by the prized point-guard recruit Brandon Jennings to spurn Arizona — he had not yet qualified academically — and instead play professionally overseas, sidestepping the N.B.A. entirely and making Jennings a wealthy man. (He was reportedly inspired after he and his mother heard Vaccaro on the radio discussing Europe as a viable option for newly minted high-school grads.) Playing in Italy for Lottomatica Virtus Roma, Jennings will earn $1.2 million this season in salary and endorsements. If all goes well, he will be a top-10 pick in next year’s N.B.A. draft. To see Mayo work the phones, or Jennings draw a paycheck in euros at an age when he’d normally be running suicides for Lute Olson, is to see the players gaining the leverage that probably should have been theirs in the first place. For Mayo and Jennings, the supposedly dysfunctional summer game was in fact perfectly functional. The Philadelphia camp is a disorienting affair. It’s not immediately clear who the intended audience is. There are only a handful of fans and a smattering of talent-scout gurus, plus of course the coaches. The coaches are there to recruit, certainly, but because of rules that bar contact with the players — the coaches can’t even use the same bathroom — it seems more accurate to say the coaches are there to be seen recruiting. They are marketing themselves and their schools just as surely as Reebok is hawking sneakers. The players, for their part, seem to try very hard to pretend they’re not being watched, though you catch them feigning a limp now and then after a blown layup. They’ll also glance toward the stands from time to time, up to where Mike Krzyzewski and Rick Pitino and Billy Donovan and other Division I coaches are sitting. On the floor, some of the players look drum-tight, as you might expect — but not Sidney, who is the only one mugging in his camp photograph. He has a mixed week. Midway through, he submits to the indignity of a press conference devoted almost entirely to his weight. In games, he turns himself into the camp’s tallest guard, firing away from the perimeter though he is easily the biggest guy in the gym. He also finds himself fencing with the refs again. In one game, he picks up three fouls in a minute, and from where Renardo Sr. is sitting, there comes a hoarse, concussive sound. “Boooo!” And then another: “Booo!” “He’s gonna be up there as one of the all-time players [who make you] just shake your head and wish he’d wake up and figure it out,” Hoop Scoop’s Clark Francis says later. “Four years ago he could play any position, do things on the perimeter. He wasn’t heavy. And now he’s basically an underachiever. It’s a tragedy.” (Francis, it should be noted, thinks Shaquille O’Neal is an underachiever.) If his performance is indeed a disappointment, perhaps it’s only because Sidney is being measured against the absurdly high standard he set for himself. “He’s the victim of the cancer of early success,” says Tom Konchalski, the talent scout. “They may have adult ability, but they’re kids. It’s unrealistic to expect a maturity level you find in an adult.” The Sidneys themselves are sanguine about Renardo’s prospects. As of September, Francis had dropped Sidney to 39th in his rankings (he had once held the top spot) and had named him the biggest disappointment for the second summer in a row, but as both father and son are fond of saying, “the only ranking we care about is David Stern’s.” During one game in Philly, I find myself sitting behind Rick Pitino. I mention the common criticism of Sidney, that he can often look like he’s saving himself. Pitino snorts: “Saving himself for the Lakers.” The story goes that when his son was a seventh-grader in Jackson, Miss., Renardo Sr., then a security guard, approached a local A.A.U. coach named James Wright. “He saw me and said, ‘Coach, I got a son in the seventh grade, about 6-foot-5.’ Oh, really? Sure,” recalls Wright, now an assistant coach at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. “He said, ‘Coach, he wants to play on your team.’ I said just bring him by. He brought him by; I worked him out. . . . This guy’s a pro. It took me five minutes. I told his dad, ‘You sure you want me to coach him?’ And his dad was just shocked. He didn’t think he was that good. It was ridiculous. . . . He had no clue what that kid was. “He was so versatile,” Wright continues. “A freak of nature with length, ballhandling skills, and the kid’s 6-foot-5 at 12 years old? That’s a pro.” Soon enough, Wright was calling Christopher Rivers at Reebok and then Vaccaro himself, suggesting they invite the boy to Reebok’s Camp Next. About watching him for the first time, Vaccaro says, “A blind man could see. There was no question he was gonna be a great player. From that minute on, the family and I started a rapport.” Sidney debuted at ABCD the summer before ninth grade and was named co-M.V.P. of the underclassmen’s all-star game, and from there his stardom was assured. And that’s when high-school basketball got in his way. In his freshman year, Sidney hoped to play for a former University of Mississippi assistant, Wayne Brent, at the private Piney Woods School. The Mississippi High School Activities Association, however, ruled him ineligible. In Mississippi, private schools can only draw in-state students from within a 20-mile radius of the school, according to the association’s executive director, Ennis Proctor; the Sidneys lived 28.6 miles from Piney Woods, according to Brent. Had Sidney attended a public school, he would have gone to Forest Hill High School, where, some local observers pointed out, Proctor had once served as principal. Sidney practiced with Piney Woods and watched from the bench during games, and that summer seemed to indicate he might skip high-school basketball entirely, which raised eyebrows among the message-board set. “My thing is, what makes high-school basketball the alpha and omega?” says Reebok’s Christopher Rivers, who is black. “White people, traditionally. Indiana. Playing for your school’s great, but he’s not playing as a hobby, so he can go out on a Friday night, score 17 points and go to the pizza parlor. He’s playing because it’s his career.” So the Sidneys, including Renardo Jr.’s mother, Patricia, and two of his three siblings (Tacus and a sister, Tiarra), decamped for California. “To be honest,” Renardo Sr. says, “L.A. was the last resort. It was between Atlanta, Texas and L.A., and it took us a little bit of time to make that decision. We went to L.A. a couple times. We’re good friends with Master P,” the rapper, who also runs an A.A.U. team out of L.A. “You have to do what’s best for your family.” It was a good fit. Sidney’s new school, Artesia High, ran a highlight video at the team banquet at the end of the season, with a U.C.L.A. assistant coach in attendance. “I was watching his mouth drop,” says Loren Grover, Artesia’s then head coach. That year, there were plenty of highlights to choose from. “There was one fast break in a playoff game against Simi Valley. The point guard, Lorenzo McCloud, just threw it to the rim. It was, like, ‘What are you doing?’ And Renardo comes out of nowhere, catches it in midair, throws it down right behind him and dunked it. He never even saw the rim. Just . . . wow.” Is basketball a danger? Is Renardo Sidney a danger? We’re sitting in a Thai restaurant in Los Angeles, not far from Fairfax High School, where Sidney has just started his senior year and where his team will likely once again contend for the city and maybe the state title. This morning he was run ragged in the school’s gym, under the whistle of John Williams, a freelance trainer and former N.B.A. big man whom everyone called “Hot Plate” to distinguish him from the lankier John (Hot Rod) Williams, the springy former N.B.A big man. Sidney transferred to Fairfax for his junior year, just months after winning a state championship at Artesia. There were a number of factors, according to his father, including Patricia’s new job in the Hollywood area. And though he doesn’t mention it, the fact that Coach Grover had left Artesia for Pomona’s Diamond Ranch High School — for reasons Grover won’t discuss, other than to say he had been placed in “a difficult situation” — no doubt figured in the decision as well. At the moment, however, Sidney and I are chewing over the matter of the mohawk, a hair style that Sidney wore, briefly and regrettably, earlier this year. He thinks it had a good deal to do with his problems at a tournament in Arizona in May, when he recalls earning at least one technical foul every game and getting tossed twice. “The mohawk made me kinda crazy,” Sidney is saying. Basketball makes its own monsters. They are the outward manifestations of the game’s bipolarity — its abiding pathology, the one true fundamental, going all the way back to James Naismith and his famously unruly Y.M.C.A. charges. Naismith saw the game as a pedagogical pursuit, something to occupy the men during the cold winters in Springfield, Mass., and not incidentally to spread the robust gospel of muscular Christianity. But at the same time, he designed the game expressly in the hope that the masses could learn it on their own, no coach necessary, taking the sermon out of the preacher’s hands. “Is Basket-Ball a Danger?,” the Y.M.C.A. newsletter asked in 1894. “The gymnasium is not a playhouse,” a director for the organization wrote, sounding many of the same notes the N.B.A. would hit a century later in demonizing its own employees as overpaid greedheads during labor strife, “and when a man gets to be a basketball fiend it is very hard to do anything with him.” And here is Renardo Sidney, the sum of basketball’s newest fears. “Renardo Sidney,” Reebok’s Christopher Rivers says. “Fantastic basketball player. Good kid, never been arrested, not on drugs, never kicked out of school, not failing classes. He’s a normal kid. Probably comes home late and spends too much time on his computer. But because he’s 6-foot-10 and he’s special and has the ability to make a lot of money if he continues his craft, and he’s treated like there’s something wrong with him? What’s wrong with him?” Sidney claims that he doesn’t read his notices, and that he only hears what people are saying about him through his parents. “Ain’t nothing on the Internet but negative stuff,” he says. Still, he seems fully apprised of the charges leveled against him and his father. “That he can’t control me,” he says. “That they see where I get my attitude from. I don’t like that.” He is keenly aware that people now call him fat. “It’s true,” he says. “I was fat. I put that in my brain when I get on the floor. All I can think of, he’s fat, he’s slow, he’s lazy. So I just work harder, you know?” He’s at 270 pounds now, down from nearly 300 and still dropping, the fruits of a steady month of workouts, sometimes two a day. He starts plyometrics training in a few days, and his father hopes to hire a personal chef soon, someone who will keep the fridge stocked with three healthy precooked meals a day. “More have been slain by supper than the sword,” as the talent scout Tom Konchalski notes. Sidney is one of the best youth athletes in the land, and now this is what basketball has become: an 18-year-old responding to fat jokes. Which is why, when the waiter materializes, there is a particularly fraught moment as Sidney deliberates over the menu. “Do you all have that brown rice?” Sidney asks. (He eats here frequently.) The waiter nods. “Does it taste just like the fried rice I’ve been eating?” The waiter seems doubtful. “If you use brown rice, it’ll be soggy.” “But I’m saying, will it taste like what we’ve been eating?” Sidney turns to ask his dad something, then whips back around and starts tapping his menu on the table thoughtfully. The waiter’s pen is poised. “Just give me the brown rice, like how you make the other rice. It has that little sweet taste to it?” “Everything’s the same,” the waiter says. “It’s just the texture.” “It’s fine, it’s fine,” Sidney says at last. A pause. “But no vegetables.” The waiter scurries off, and Sidney alights once again on the subject of his mohawk. It was nothing dramatic, nothing like you might have found on Mr. T. Still, in Arizona, he found himself mouthing off constantly, especially to the refs. What would he say? “You suck,” he says. “But it’d be, like, with cuss words.” He’d cuss at his dad, he says. “I’d cuss out anybody. It [the mohawk] just made me go crazy.” People noticed, too. The University of Arizona student paper described him as “not the character Arizona wants.” So Sidney shaved the thing off and swore never to have one again. “And when I cut the mohawk off,” he says, “I was just a normal person.” | Sidney Renardo;Basketball;Interscholastic Athletics;College Athletics |
ny0280777 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2016/10/30 | Tal Afar, West of Mosul, Becomes Center of Battle for Influence in Iraq | ERBIL, Iraq — The city of Tal Afar, a former Ottoman outpost not far from Mosul that has a mostly ethnic Turkmen population and has been home to a corps of Islamic State leaders, on Saturday became the focus of a growing struggle between Turkey and Iran for influence in northern Iraq. That is because Iraq’s Shiite militias, some of which receive support from Iran, began on Saturday to move west of Mosul, a trajectory that would essentially cut off Islamic State fighters in the city from their bases in Syria. The Shiite militias’ move toward Tal Afar could also draw Turkey deeper into the already complex battlefield around Mosul. As the two-week-old campaign to reclaim Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, from the Islamic State grinds on in outlying villages, the role of the Shiite militias, controversial because of their history of abuse toward the Sunni population, was part of a delicate set of negotiations involving the Iraqi government and the American-led coalition. Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, agreed to allow the militias a secondary role of sealing off the desert areas west of Mosul, but not entering the city itself. Image Members of the Hashd al-Shaabi, the Shiite militias, fired artillery during clashes with Islamic State militants south of Mosul on Saturday. Credit Reuters That seemed to placate the Americans as well as Sunni leaders, especially because the militias, known as the Hashd al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilization Units, could prove useful in catching Islamic State fighters trying to flee Mosul, as well as any reinforcements the terrorist group might try to send in from Raqqa, its de facto capital in Syria. The militias, on paper at least, are under the control of the Iraqi government, but many of the most powerful ones answer to Iran and were accused of atrocities during Iraq’s sectarian civil war about a decade ago. But the fight against the Islamic State has given them new legitimacy and political power, even though human rights groups have accused them of revenge attacks against Sunnis during previous battles against the terrorist group. “The Hashd will get the desert,” Staff Gen. Wathiq al Hamdani, the commander of Mosul’s police force, whose men will secure the city once the army and counterterrorism forces retake it, said in an interview on Saturday. “And it’s a very difficult axis. We have no problem with that, as long as they stay away from the civilians.” In announcing the offensive by the militias, Ahmed al-Assadi, a militia spokesman, said, “The wounded city of Tal Afar and other areas are within our duties, and will be liberated by our sacred arms and rifles.” The Battle for Mosul: Iraqi Forces Enter the City Iraqi forces have entered Mosul after two weeks of fighting. The role of the militias has alarmed Turkey, which has stationed troops in Bashiqa, a town north of Mosul, to train Kurdish and Sunni Arab fighters. It did so without the approval of Baghdad’s Shiite-led government, which has argued that the troop deployment was a violation of the country’s sovereignty. Tensions have run high in recent weeks , with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, insisting that Turkey has historical claims in the region dating from the Ottoman Empire. Turkey, with its military deployment in Iraq, has sought to counter the influence of Iran and its militias. The competition for influence in northern Iraq between Turkey, a Sunni power, and Iran, the region’s most powerful Shiite nation, is part of the broader sectarian struggle tearing apart the Middle East. At least for now, the struggle will be focused on Tal Afar, whose Turkmen population shares a lineage with Turkey, and on the question of whether Turkey will make a move once the militias move on the city. The sectarian divide also cuts through Tal Afar: While Sunnis are there now, before it was taken over by the Islamic State the city was home to a large number of Shiite Turkmen, whom Iran wants to protect and help return to the city. Turkey’s insistence on a role in the campaign for Mosul, which the United States has objected to unless the Iraqi government agrees, has also deepened sectarian tensions within Iraq. Shiite protesters have converged on the Turkish Embassy in Baghdad, and Iraqi leaders, including Mr. Abadi, have suggested that the two countries could be on a path to military confrontation. Image Food was distributed to Iraqis at a refugee camp in Qaiyara, south of Mosul, on Saturday. Credit Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Many Shiites have been taken aback by Turkey’s stance, looking through the lens of history to the Ottoman times when Turkey elevated a Sunni elite to govern the Shiite majority. “No one has any right to deny any Iraqi the honor of liberating his land,” Ammar al-Hakim, a prominent Shiite religious and political leader, said this past week, in reference to Turkey’s opposition to the Shiite militias. Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, has said Turkey will take all necessary measures if it sees a threat emerge to the Sunni Turkmen in Tal Afar after the militias push out the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh. “Fighting Daesh is necessary,” he said. “But the process after Daesh must be planned carefully. We will not forsake the Turkmens living there. Ethnic and sectarian balances must be taken into account in Mosul and Tal Afar.” | Mosul;Tal Afar;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Iraq;Iran;Shiite;Sunnis;Turkey |
ny0226702 | [
"sports"
] | 2010/10/01 | Columnist Is Sentenced To Probation | The Los Angeles city attorney’s office said the AOL Fanhouse columnist Jay Mariotti pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor battery count stemming from an August incident involving a female companion. A spokesman for the city attorney said Mariotti was sentenced to community service, a domestic violence course and 36 months of probation. Mariotti was originally charged with seven counts, but all other counts were dismissed. | Domestic Violence;AOL;ESPN;Mariotti Jay |
ny0201997 | [
"technology",
"internet"
] | 2009/09/22 | A $1 Million Research Bargain for Netflix, and Maybe a Model for Others | Even the near-miss losers in the Netflix million-dollar-prize competition seemed to have few regrets. Netflix, the movie rental company, announced on Monday that a seven-man team was the winner of its closely watched three-year contest to improve its Web site’s movie recommendation system. That was expected, but the surprise was in the nail-biter finish. The losing team, as it turned out, precisely matched the performance of the winner, but submitted its entry 20 minutes later, just before the final deadline expired. Under contest rules, in the event of a tie, the first team past the post was the winner. “That 20 minutes was worth a million dollars,” Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, said at a news conference in New York. Yet the scientists and engineers on the second-place team, and the employers who gave many of them the time and freedom to compete in the contest, were hardly despairing. Arnab Gupta, chief executive of Opera Solutions, a consulting company that specializes in data analytics, based in New York, took a small group of his leading researchers off other work for two years. “We’ve already had a $10 million payoff internally from what we’ve learned,” Mr. Gupta said. Working on the contest helped the researchers come up with improved statistical analysis and predictive modeling techniques that his firm has used with clients in fields like marketing, retailing and finance, he said. “So for us, the $1 million prize was secondary, almost trivial.” Indeed, since it began in October 2006, the Netflix contest was significant less for the prize money than as a test case for new ideas about how to efficiently foster innovation in the Internet era — notably, offering prizes as an incentive and encouraging online collaboration to tap minds worldwide. The lessons of the Netflix contest could extend well beyond improving movie picks. The researchers from around the world were grappling with a huge data set — 100 million movie ratings — and the challenges of large-scale modeling, which can be applied across the fields of science, commerce and politics. The prize model is increasingly being tried on work like new science and freelance projects in design and advertising. The X Prize Foundation, for example, is offering multimillion-dollar prizes for path-breaking advances in genomics, alternative energy cars and private space exploration. InnoCentive is a marketplace for business projects, where companies post challenges — often in areas like product development or applied science — and workers or teams compete for cash payments or prizes offered by the companies. A start-up, Genius Rocket, runs a similar online marketplace mainly for marketing, advertising and design projects. “The great advantage of the prize model is that it moves work away from the realm of the beauty contest to being performance-oriented,” said Michael Schrage, research fellow at the Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s the results produced that matters.” The emerging prize economy, according to some labor market analysts, does carry the danger of being a further shift in the balance of power toward the buyers — corporations — and away from most workers. Thousands of teams from more than 100 nations competed in the Netflix prize contest. And it was a good deal for Netflix. “You look at the cumulative hours and you’re getting Ph.D.’s for a dollar an hour,” Mr. Hastings said in an interview. Netflix, Mr. Hastings said, did not do a crisp cost-benefit analysis of its investment in the contest. But several crucial techniques garnered from the contest have been folded into the company’s in-house movie recommendation software, Cinematch, and customer retention rates have improved slightly. Better recommendations, Netflix says, enhance customer satisfaction. “We strongly believe this has been a big winner for Netflix,” Mr. Hastings said. The prize winner was a team of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel, calling itself BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos. The group was actually a merger of teams that came together late in the contest. In late June, the team finally surpassed the threshold to qualify for the prize by doing at least 10 percent better than Cinematch in accurately predicting the movies customers would like, as measured against actual ratings. Under the contest rules, that set off a 30-day period in which other teams could try to beat them. That, in turn, prompted a wave of mergers among competing teams, who joined forces at the last minute to try to top the leader. In late July, Netflix declared the contest over, and its online leader board showed two teams had passed the 10 percent threshold: BellKor and the Ensemble, a global alliance with some 30 members. Netflix said the contest was too close to call, and the leader board showed a slight edge to the Ensemble. However, the teams’ software had to go through two data sets — one public, which was the basis for the leader board, and another hidden one, which determined the outcome of the contest. The second data set was there to ensure that the winning solution really was the best at making better movie recommendations in general, and was not just tailored to get the best score from the public data set. Win or lose, researchers agreed that they entered the contest in good part to get access to the Netflix data. “It was incredibly alluring to work on such a large, high-quality data set,” said Joe Sill, an independent consultant and machine-learning expert who was a member of the Ensemble. Chris Volinsky, a member of BellKor, who is a scientist at AT&T Research, said Netflix “made a brilliant move by realizing that there was a research community out there that worked on these kinds of models and was starving for data. “Netflix had the data, but only a handful of people working on the problem.” Netflix was so pleased with the results of its first contest that it announced a second one on Monday. The new contest will present contestants with demographic and behavioral data, including renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes, genre ratings and previously chosen movies — but not ratings. Contestants will then have to predict which movies those people will like. Unlike the first challenge, the contest will have no specific accuracy target. Instead, $500,000 will be awarded to the team in the lead after the first six months, and $500,000 to the leader after 18 months. The winners of the first contest said the money would be split seven ways, according to a formula they declined to disclose. The amounts each received, they said, would certainly help with a car, house payments or children’s college educations — but were not life-changing. When asked if he planned to take on the second Netflix prize, Bob Bell, a scientist at AT&T Research, said, “I like the notion, but I think I’m too tired.” | Netflix Incorporated;Contests and Prizes;Computers and the Internet;Awards Decorations and Honors;Hastings Reed |
ny0240144 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2010/12/31 | Israel Confirms Major Natural Gas Discovery | JERUSALEM — Exploratory drilling off Israel ’s northern coast this week has confirmed the existence of a major natural gas field — one of the world’s largest offshore gas finds of the past decade — leading the country’s infrastructure minister to call it “the most important energy news since the founding of the state.” Houston-based Noble Energy , which is working with several Israeli partner companies, said that the field, named Leviathan, whose existence was suspected months ago , has at least 16 trillion cubic feet of gas at a likely market value of tens of billions of dollars and should turn Israel into an energy exporter. “If it acts correctly, levelheadedly and responsibly, Israel can enjoy not only the benefit of using the gas, but it can also turn into a gas supplier in the Mediterranean region,” the infrastructure minister, Uzi Landau, said in a statement. “The large reserves of natural gas will enable Israel’s citizens to enjoy the benefit of clean and inexpensive electricity, as well as the expected profits for the state.” The find means that Israel, with a long history of dependence on foreign energy, and hostility and boycotts from many of the biggest energy powers, could find itself in a much more advantageous position in the coming decade. But the find has been accompanied by a heated debate over how much in taxes and royalties Israel will charge. A state-appointed committee headed by an economist at Hebrew University, Eytan Sheshinski, is planning to recommend substantially increased profit taxes, opposed by the companies and some on the political right. Gideon Tadmor, the chief executive of Delek Energy and Avner Oil Exploration, partners in this venture with Noble, said the taxes could make the project prohibitively expensive. “The gas may stay in the ground because we will not succeed in obtaining from banks around the world the tens of billions of shekels for developing the reservoir,” he said in an interview. He said that this new find could impel neighboring countries, including Cyprus, Lebanon and Syria, to explore and possibly develop their potential gas fields, and warned that Israel needed to move quickly to be the first to export its gas. Delek estimates that if it moves aggressively, it could begin producing gas from Leviathan in five to six years. This year, the United States Geological Survey estimated that more than 120 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas reserves, equivalent to 20 billion barrels of oil , lay beneath the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean. That would put it in the same league as the Alaskan North Slope (about 22 billion barrels) but far short of Saudi Arabia, which has proven reserves of 262 billion barrels. In reaction to the Israeli announcement, Lebanese politicians said they would move more quickly in exploring their country’s gas potential. Professor Sheshinski said that Israel had among the very lowest energy tax rates anywhere and that it was time to update that. “We have proposed a profit tax to be imposed after the firms earn an adequate return on their investment,” Professor Sheshinski said in an interview. “We have checked with the banks and we will be well within world averages. Anyone who knows the numbers can be assured of a proper return.” Professor Sheshinski said that his report, due out on Monday, had already been endorsed by the governor of the Bank of Israel , Stanley Fischer; the International Monetary Fund ; and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development , which Israel recently joined . He said that the profit tax rate recommended by his committee would be 55 to 60 percent and that the O.E.C.D. average was 62 percent. The committee’s recommendations require government and parliamentary approval. Sever Plocker, an economic columnist for the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, said in a commentary on Thursday that it was far from clear that the new discovery could be developed profitably. Gas prices could fall, the techniques needed to extract the gas were likely to be complicated and expensive to develop, and exporting natural gas required enormous investment for pipelines or the means of transforming the gas into liquid to be moved on tankers, he said. “Creative thinking is our great natural resource, not gas,” he wrote. “It is our obligation to guard it with utmost care.” | Israel;Natural Gas;Offshore Drilling and Exploration |
ny0147704 | [
"world",
"americas"
] | 2008/07/15 | One More Battle for a Vintage Warship | LÁZARO CÁRDENAS, Mexico — In its glory days, the United States Navy destroyer John Rodgers was among the most decorated warships of World War II. Now, hull rusting and big guns whitened by bird droppings, the abandoned destroyer finds itself in what could be its final battle, one that could turn the historic ship into a museum or, alternatively, a heap of scrap. The John Rodgers was one of the 175 Fletcher-class destroyers, which shepherded aircraft carriers and provided withering cover fire during amphibious landings. During two and a half years in the Pacific, it fought in the Philippines and at Kwajalein Atoll, Guam, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It steamed into Tokyo Bay in September 1945, having earned 12 battle stars without, remarkably, losing a single sailor. The Fletcher destroyers were a swift breed that each carried nearly 300 sailors into war. While many of the ships suffered heavy losses from kamikaze attacks late in the war, most ended up in scrap yards in the decades after peace was achieved. Only five survive today — four as museums (in Buffalo; Baton Rouge, La.; Boston; and Greece) and the John Rodgers, which is tethered to a dock in this city, about 150 miles up the coast from Acapulco. Mexican officials want it removed forthwith. After the John Rodgers was retired in 1946, the Navy lent it to Mexico, which rechristened it the Cuitláhuac. Mexico eventually bought it outright and deployed it on patrols, including hunts for narcotics traffickers. That ended in July 2001. Then along came Ward Brewer II, 45, an American entrepreneur who drafted a plan after 9/11 to recycle World War II-era ships as floating command posts during disasters in the United States. Mr. Brewer’s disaster plan never won the backing of the United States government, but he persuaded the Mexicans to issue a presidential decree in 2006 turning over the John Rodgers to his nonprofit company, the Beauchamp Tower Corporation. He proposed that the John Rodgers be based in Mobile Bay, in Alabama, as a floating museum, but be available as a communications and logistics center should disaster strike. First, though, the ship would have to voyage home, which has proved a tricky task. “We ran into a number of issues,” Mr. Brewer said in a telephone interview last week. He managed in August 2006 to persuade a Texas towing company to haul the John Rodgers through the Panama Canal to Mobile. Veterans of the John Rodgers, dwindling in numbers as years pass, planned to have a reunion in October 2006 to coincide with its arrival at Mobile Bay. The ship proved a no-show. And the venerable destroyer, unscathed in war, found itself in an international legal battle. John Bergene, who owns the towing company E. J. Ventures, said that on Labor Day weekend in 2006, he hired a crew of five, bought fuel and dispatched a tow ship to Mexico. At the last moment, he said, Mr. Brewer called to say a down payment on towing fees would be delayed until after the holiday. The money never arrived, but Mr. Brewer provided bank references sufficient for Mr. Bergene to proceed — “against my better judgment,” he said in a telephone interview from the Netherlands. Then he went to Mexico, only to find that Mr. Brewer was stalling, Mr. Bergene said. “He said Wednesday you’ll get your money, and then Thursday and then Friday,” Mr. Bergene recounted. “Finally I said we’re not going anywhere until I get my money.” After a month and a half, Mr. Bergene said, he found another towing job and sailed away. Mr. Brewer contends that the towing fiasco resulted from a series of misunderstandings with Mr. Bergene and the Mexican government. Still, Mr. Bergene won a federal court judgment of nearly $800,000 against Mr. Brewer and Beauchamp Tower. Unable to collect, he has a lien on the John Rodgers. “It’s hurt me badly, and it’s hurt a lot of people badly, and it’s made the Mexican government look like fools,” Mr. Bergene said. “The Mexican government needs to go after Ward.” The Mexican authorities may do just that. They say they have been infinitely patient. They say Mr. Brewer initially told them that after having the John Rodgers removed from a Mexican naval base, he would store the 376-foot vessel at a nearby granary pier for a week or so. It has been there more than 18 months. Port officials said they were consulting lawyers and making plans to seize the ship and sell it for scrap. “The hurricane season is coming and it’s a danger for all of us,” said Samuel Fonseca, head of the grain port here. “If they can’t move it from this port, we have to see what we can do.” Even if the ship is scrapped, the fate most of the Fletcher destroyers have met, it probably will not yield enough to cover all the debt associated with it, Mexican officials say. Besides the $800,000 court judgment, Mexican officials say Mr. Brewer owes as much as $1 million in fines and other fees from the ship’s long stay in Mexico. Beauchamp Tower’s tax return put its gross income last year at less than $25,000. Transforming old warships into museums typically costs more, sometimes millions of dollars more, than many veterans groups imagine. The obsolete vessels are floating asbestos mines, full of assorted solvents, fuels and other toxins as well. And their guns, though long silent, worry the United States government, which seeks assurances that they are licensed or disabled. The challenges do not stop there. Spare parts are a problem. Crew members who know the vessels are dying off. Then there is insurance, constant painting, naval architect’s fees and assorted permits. On top of all that, the cost of towing the John Rodgers home has ballooned with soaring fuel prices. What was originally a $350,000 job, Mr. Bergene said, would cost about $500,000. Then there is the condition of the John Rodgers itself. Long neglected, it is showing wear. Rust is building up, and wind is tearing away at the deck where American sailors helped wage some of the Pacific war’s greatest battles. “I used to go on deck and watch everything going on,” said Gerry Fried, 91, a former Navy radio operator now living in Scottsdale, Ariz. Recalling the fighting on the Japanese coast, he added, “It was very exciting when the ship pulled into Suruga Wan and shelled the shore.” Some who served on the ship are resigned to never seeing the John Rodgers again. “I’d like to see it brought back to the States, of course, but it seems to be headed to scrapyards,” said David Carnell, 87, of Wilmington, N.C., who was a young officer aboard the John Rodgers in 1945. Mr. Brewer, though, remains ever the optimist. The other day, he said in a telephone interview from Florida that deals were in the works, plans being made, delicate discussions taking place. The destroyer would be on its way to the United States by month’s end, he said. Later, he said that could slip to August, at the latest. “We’re planning to move it out of there,” Mr. Brewer said, urging that no article on the John Rodgers be published until his deal was done. “I can’t go into any details.” | Mexico;Ships and Shipping;United States Navy;Museums |
ny0200985 | [
"sports",
"football"
] | 2009/09/19 | Court Ruling May Undermine Antidoping Programs in Pro Sports | A federal court ruling has jeopardized the National Football League ’s ability to enforce its drug-testing program and raised significant doubts about the programs of other professional sports in the United States. The ruling revealed a new door for athletes to challenge their doping suspensions: players in the N.F.L., Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League may now turn to state courts, hampering the leagues’ abilities to discipline players. The other leagues and the United States Anti-Doping Agency , which oversees the testing of Olympians, were so concerned about these prospects that they filed friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the N.F.L.’s position. “This is the most significant legal challenge we have ever seen to the collectively bargained drug-testing programs in this country,” Travis Tygart, the chief of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, said. A three-judge panel from the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit , in Minneapolis, last week upheld a lower court ruling that prohibited the N.F.L. from suspending two Minnesota Vikings players who violated the league’s antidoping policy, saying they could contest their suspensions in state court. The ruling was a victory for the players because Minnesota state laws — and laws in about half of all states — are considered worker-friendly and say that an employee cannot be penalized for an initial positive drug test. “Why should a football player not have the same rights that a person in Minnesota has?” said Mark S. Levinstein, a lawyer in Washington for the firm Williams & Connolly who has represented dozens of professional athletes, including Lance Armstrong. “The idea that the N.F.L. is more important than the views of state legislators is ridiculous. The N.F.L. is just confronting what most businesses have to deal with, which is different laws in different states. That is just how our country is set up.” Scott Boras, an agent for many of the top players in baseball, said an adherence to state workplace laws would reshape the collective bargaining process, which includes the creation of doping policies. “The parties will now have to consider the limitation of employment rights,” he said. The ruling handcuffed N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell in the league’s case against the two Vikings players, Pat Williams and Kevin Williams . Goodell said that because he wanted to impose discipline evenly, he would also not enforce the four-game suspensions of two New Orleans Saints players who tested positive for the same substance. The result, for now, is that four players who violated the antidoping program are allowed to play all season without penalty. (All four said they had inadvertently ingested the banned substance — the diuretic bumetanide — when they took an over-the-counter weight-loss supplement called StarCaps.) “We have players subject to two sets of rules — six months from now, who knows how many?” said Jeff Pash, the N.F.L.’s chief counsel. He added: “The state law issue has cast a needless cloud of uncertainty over the way in which the program is going to operate. For the first time, we have an effort to attack the program through the vehicle of one state’s law, and the union’s failure to stand behind the collectively bargained program has compromised it.” The two Vikings players initially filed suit in Minnesota state court claiming that the suspensions violated the state’s Drug and Alcohol Testing in the Workplace Act and the Consumable Products Act. The N.F.L. and other leagues have limited options. The N.F.L. can appeal the decision to a larger panel of federal judges. However, even though state-court suits for breaches of collective bargaining law are pre-empted by federal law , the Supreme Court has made clear that that is a relatively narrow category. The pro sports leagues could also try to lobby Congress to pass legislation that would state that their collective bargaining agreements trump state laws. But turning to Congress — which is dealing with two wars, a recovering economy and health care reform — could be difficult and presents risks because Congress could compel the leagues to adopt even more transparent and rigorous antidoping programs. “They are headed down a dangerous path,” Gabe Feldman, a professor of sports law at Tulane University , said. “The leagues have been fighting for years to keep Congress away from meddling with their drug policies, and now they are asking for the opposite: their help. Congress rarely gives things out without asking for something in exchange, like, in this case, forcing the leagues to toughen their policies.” As troubling as the ruling is for the leagues, it is not known how many players will try to challenge their positive tests. “I don’t think competitive balance would be destroyed by this because the Vikings players are now all of a sudden going to use steroids and start looking like RoboCop,” said Levinstein, the lawyer who has represented athletes. “Maybe the N.F.L. should decide to test those players more in light of the state laws.” | Doping (Sports);Football;National Football League;Steroids |
ny0281239 | [
"sports",
"football"
] | 2016/10/15 | Is It a Risk for the 49ers to Start Colin Kaepernick? Not for Them. | When the San Francisco 49ers play the Buffalo Bills on Sunday, Colin Kaepernick will make his first start of the season as the 49ers’ quarterback. Although Kaepernick is currently best known for refusing to stand for the national anthem — a protest against racial injustice that has spread across the sports landscape — it wasn’t all that long ago that he was the dynamic young quarterback who led his team to a Super Bowl appearance and a conference championship game in back-to-back seasons. In 2014, though, the 49ers missed the playoffs, and by the middle of last season, Kaepernick was playing so poorly that he lost his starting spot to Blaine Gabbert. This season, Gabbert has been awful, and so have the 49ers (1-4). The team’s desolated fans have taken to chanting, “We want Kap.” So Chip Kelly, the team’s coach, is giving Kaepernick another shot at running the team. As woeful as the 49ers have been, and as much as the fans need that sliver of hope, the team would never have let Kaepernick onto the field unless he had agreed to renegotiate his contract. The new deal was completed Wednesday. For Kaepernick to play, the 49ers told him, he had to be willing to accept all the financial risk of a serious injury. Given Kaepernick’s three operations in the last year, that possibility is not exactly remote. (The team declined to talk about Kaepernick’s reworked contract.) Major League Baseball and N.B.A. players sign contracts that pay them even if they sustain career-ending injuries. Football players, who have the highest risk of serious injury, are, for the most part, not afforded such financial protection. That may not rise to the level of the racial injustice Kaepernick has been protesting, but it sure doesn’t seem right. When you read that a basketball player has signed a four-year, $60 million contract, those numbers can generally be taken at face value: The player is guaranteed to receive $60 million over the next four years, even if he is injured or cut from the team. But when you read about a football player’s contract, the numbers don’t necessarily reflect reality. For years, the typical football contract allowed a team to cut a player who got hurt (or didn’t play up to par) and not pay him anything beyond the season in which he was injured — even if his contract was for several years. The situation has improved markedly, with many players now receiving signing bonuses and some guaranteed money, but a football contract that is entirely guaranteed is still the exception, not the rule. Image Kaepernick flexed after scrambling 15 yards for a 49ers touchdown in a 34-31 loss to the Ravens in the Super Bowl in February 2013. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times Kaepernick’s contracts have been typical. As a second-round draft choice in 2011, he signed what was described as a four-year, $5.1 million deal. Of that, however, only $3.8 million was guaranteed, including a $2.2 million signing bonus. So if he had flamed out or gotten hurt, the 49ers would have been out only $3.8 million rather than the $5.1 million the contract suggested. Three years later, after having led the 49ers to a Super Bowl in the 2012 season and the N.F.C. championship game in the 2013 season, Kaepernick signed a new deal with the team that was reported to be worth as much as $126 million over six years. It included what was described as a “record” $61 million in guaranteed money. In fact, the deal was terribly lopsided — in the 49ers’ favor. Although Kaepernick’s annual salary was in the range of what top quarterbacks were getting — he was guaranteed almost $13 million in 2014 — there was clause after clause that benefited the team. Most marquee players have contracts calling for the team to pay for a disability policy in case of a career-ending injury; Kaepernick’s contract called for him to pony up for a $20 million policy that would be paid to the 49ers. If Kaepernick didn’t suit up for a game, it would cost him $250,000 — far more than most other players. There was an annual $2 million salary “de-escalator” unless he was named to the All-Pro first or second team or won the N.F.C. title game. And on and on. And that $61 million in guaranteed money? It was a mirage. Much of that money was tied to an “injury guarantee” clause; it said that if Kaepernick was seriously injured in one season, and remained injured as of April 1 the next year, he would have to be paid his entire salary for that second year. That was certainly more protection than players had gotten in the past, but it was hardly a $61 million guarantee. Why, you might be wondering, don’t football players have the kind of financial protection against injury that baseball and basketball players have? The obvious answer is that the owners are fiercely opposed to it. Serious injuries are far more common in football than in baseball and basketball. Paying players who are hurt for more than one season would be expensive. In addition, the N.F.L. operates under a “hard” salary cap. Using part of the cap to pay injured players would make it difficult to field a roster of talented players. And while marquee players operate from a position of strength, the average player doesn’t have much leverage. The typical length of an N.F.L. career is less than four years, and most football players are surprisingly fungible. So few of them are willing to hold out for contract guarantees. They know what happened in 1987 when the players went on strike only to see the owners hire replacement players — and break the strike in less than a month. More than athletes in other sports, football players fear for their jobs. And the owners know it. Which brings us back to Kaepernick. Observers of the 49ers will tell you that by the time he was benched in November 2015, the relationship between Kaepernick and the team’s management had soured. Kaepernick felt he was being blamed for the team’s decline — even though the coach who had transformed the team, Jim Harbaugh, had departed and the talent surrounding Kaepernick wasn’t nearly what it had been just a few years earlier. The front office felt that his skills had declined so much — he was the league’s 30th-ranked passer — that he no longer merited an elite quarterback’s pay. In late November, Kaepernick had shoulder surgery (which, because of his contract, cost him money because he was no longer suiting up for games). Two months later, he had operations on a thumb and a knee. And a month after that, he demanded a trade. The 49ers shopped him around, and though a few teams were interested, they all wanted Kaepernick to take a pay cut, which he refused to do. As the trade possibilities faded, speculation grew in the San Francisco news media that the team would cut him. But the 49ers couldn’t cut Kaepernick. Before April 1, he was still recovering from football-related injuries, and under the collective bargaining agreement, teams can’t cut players in that situation. And if they had cut him after April 1, they would have had to pay him his full 2016 salary. So he remained part of the roster for 2016, and his “injury guarantee” kicked in for 2017. That meant that if Kaepernick sustained a serious enough injury during the 2016 season, he would be due his entire 2017 salary, which amounted to $14.5 million. The prospect of spending that money on a player the team no longer wanted could not have been pleasant for the 49ers’ front office to contemplate. Kelly, the coach, asserts that no one in the front office ever said anything about the financial consequences of playing Kaepernick. But that’s hard to believe. Entering Sunday, Kaepernick had been on the field for only three plays, all of them handoffs to a running back. And this week, in anticipation of his start against the Bills on Sunday, the 49ers and Kaepernick agreed to a contract restructuring. Under the new terms, he will earn about $14 million in 2016, and he has an option to remain with the team in 2017. But the remaining years of his old contract will be erased — and, most important to the 49ers, so will his injury guarantee. Thus, if Kaepernick sustains a serious injury this season, the team will no longer be on the hook for his $14.5 million salary in 2017. Some contend this is a win-win for the team and the player. But it’s not. Kaepernick agreed to the deal because he wants to play — and wants to show other teams that he still has the goods. He hopes to score big in free agency after this season is over. But Kaepernick is the one taking all the risk — including the risk of serious injury — while the 49ers have managed to eliminate their own financial risk and move it onto the player. Which is exactly the way they like to do it in the N.F.L. | Football;49ers;Colin Kaepernick;Sports injury |
ny0274875 | [
"sports",
"basketball"
] | 2016/02/11 | Late Jumper Lifts Spurs Over Magic | Kawhi Leonard scored 29 points and drilled a jumper from the top of the key with 0.9 on the clock to lift the visiting San Antonio Spurs to a 98-96 win over the Orlando Magic on Wednesday night. LaMarcus Aldridge had 21 points, and Patty Mills added 17 points and 7 assists for the Spurs, who won their fourth straight. Evan Fournier, whose 3-pointer tied the score with 13.3 seconds left, led Orlando with 28 points. Elfrid Payton missed a layup that would have tied the score at the buzzer. CAVALIERS 120, LAKERS 111 Kobe Bryant’s final game at Cleveland was reduced to a sideshow when Cavaliers forward Kevin Love reinjured his surgically repaired left shoulder in his team’s win over Los Angeles. The Cavaliers, who got a season-high 35 points from Kyrie Irving, did not provide specifics about Love’s injury. T’WOLVES 117, RAPTORS 112 Karl-Anthony Towns had 35 points and 11 rebounds, and the Minnesota Timberwolves rallied from an 18-point deficit to stun visiting Toronto, which had won 14 of its previous 15. NUGGETS 103, PISTONS 92 Will Barton scored 15 of his 20 points in the fourth quarter, and visiting Denver held off Detroit. CELTICS 139, CLIPPERS 134 Isaiah Thomas had 36 points and 11 assists, making a fadeaway jumper that sent the game into overtime, and Boston edged visiting Los Angeles. HORNETS 117, PACERS 95 Kemba Walker scored 25 points as Charlotte rolled past host Indiana. Six players scored in double figures for the Hornets. KINGS 114, 76ERS 110 DeMarcus Cousins had 28 points and 12 rebounds, and Darren Collison scored 21 of his 25 points after halftime to lead Sacramento to a comeback win at Philadelphia. PELICANS 100, JAZZ 96 Anthony Davis capped a 19-point night with a running left-handed hook and a 3-pointer in the final minute, and host New Orleans ended Utah’s seven-game winning streak. | Basketball;Spurs;Orlando Magic |
ny0224250 | [
"sports",
"soccer"
] | 2010/11/15 | Australian Leads South Korean Club to Asian Title | TOKYO — Games, tournaments and careers can hinge on the most fleeting of moments. After 25 minutes of the Asian Champions League final between Seongnam Ilhwa Chunma of South Korea and Zob Ahan of Iran, Seongnam’s captain, Sasa Ognenovski, was jogging back to his usual spot in defense after his team’s corner kick had been cleared for a throw-in near the opposition penalty area. At the last second, Kim Cheol-ho took the Australian’s place in the back line, and Ognenovski turned around to rejoin the attack. Within seconds, the giant defender was engulfed by yellow shirts after stabbing a loose ball into the Iranian net from close range for a 1-0 lead. The goal set Seongnam on its way to a deserved 3-1 victory, South Korea on its way to a record ninth triumph in the club competition and East Asia on its way to a fifth successive victory in the tournament “To score a goal in the final and win the trophy is unbelievable,” Ognenovski said after the game. “When the ball came down to me, I just thought ‘This is going in’ and made sure it did.” Ognenovski, 31, has had quite a week. It took him time to settle in South Korea in 2009 following his move from Adelaide, but in 2010 he was appointed captain, a rare honor for an overseas player. Now, not only is he the first Australian to collect an Asian Champions League winner’s medal, he was also named Player of the Tournament, a rare honor for a defender. Just hours after the final whistle, he was on a plane bound for Cairo to play for the Australian national team for the very first time against Egypt on Wednesday. “Yeah, it’s been a fantastic few days, but there’s not much time for celebrating,” he grinned. “I may be able to sneak a couple in, though.” His coach, Shin Tae-yong, would not begrudge him that. Shin also set a first with the victory: He is now the only person to win the competition as both player, in 1995, and coach. Both victories came with the same club, and the man known as “Mr. Seongnam” said he preferred the more recent victory. “It is more enjoyable as a coach,” Shin said. “As a player, I expected to win things, but since I became a head coach, it was more difficult to imagine that we would be able to be successful.” He will get another chance next month in Abu Dhabi, when the champion of each confederation will gather for FIFA’s Club World Cup, where Seongnam could meet the European champion, Inter Milan. “We want to show the world that Asian football is at a high level,” Shin said. “The quality of football in Asia is improving, and I am sure it will get even better.” It seems to be doing so in some parts of the continent more than others. For a fifth successive time, Asia will be represented at the Club World Cup by a team from its eastern edge, while the Middle East, host of the tournament, has another dry year at a club level. The national team situation is no better for nations in Asia’s west. The likes of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Bahrain all failed to qualify for the 2010 World Cup, while Japan and South Korea — the two nations dominating Asian soccer at the moment — made it to the last sixteen in South Africa. “I think the players on this side of Asia are a lot more technical than those on the other side of Asia,” Ognenovski said. “Not all the leagues are professional in West Asia, and until that happens I don’t think they’ll compete with this side for a while, but Zob Ahan was certainly a tough team and gave us a good game.” Ognenovski spoiled Zob Ahan’s game plan with his opening goal. The Iranians usually don’t score many goals, but they concede even fewer, as they showed when they knocked out some of the biggest names in Asian club soccer on their way to the final. Defending leads, not chasing them, is what suits the men from Isfahan, and when Cho Byung-kuk, another central defender, headed home a corner kick for Seongnam after 52 minutes, the game looked finished. “We conceded goals in a disappointing way,” admitted coach Mansour Ebrahimzadeh, who also tasted defeat in the 2007 final as an assistant with Sepahan. “We should do better in the future. We need to learn lessons from this game.” Mohammadreza Khalatbari put Zob Ahan back into the game midway through the second half to spread some uncertainty among the Seongnam players, but it did not last long. With eight minutes remaining, Kim Cheol-ho shot into an empty net to set off early celebrations among the vast majority of the 27,000 fans in the stadium. Mazembe wins Africa title TP Mazembe of Congo retained the African Champions League title despite drawing with Tunisia’s Esperance, 1-1, in the second leg of the final, The Associated Press reported from Rades, Tunisia. Mazembe won the first leg, 5-0, two weeks ago, and never looked as if it would concede that many Saturday as Esperance played out the last hour with only 10 men. | Soccer;South Korea;Iran |
ny0001436 | [
"sports",
"tennis"
] | 2013/03/26 | Stung by Latest Loss, Stephens Insists She Still Wants to Win | KEY BISCAYNE, Fla. — Everything was setting up perfectly for Sloane Stephens to reverse the downward trend she has been on since upsetting Serena Williams to reach the semifinals at the Australian Open. Stephens needed to play only one match to reach the Round of 16 at the Sony Open, a result of a first-round bye and a third-round walkover after Venus Williams pulled out with a lower back injury. That put Stephens up against the defending champion, Agnieszka Radwanska, on Monday. The grandstand crowd was behind Stephens, who started her tennis career as a toddler in nearby Coral Springs, and the draw was setting up favorably for a meeting with Serena Williams in the semifinals. But after a solid first set went in her favor, Stephens started to come apart midway through the second set, and the fourth-seeded Radwanska advanced with a 4-6, 6-2, 6-0 victory. Stephens lost the final nine games. Afterward, Stephens made her way off the court quickly and strolled past a crowd of autograph seekers without stopping. The reality of losing yet another match against a ranked opponent seemed to rub Stephens the wrong way. She is 2-5 since her signature win in Australia over Williams, losing her first matches in events in Dubai and Indian Wells, Calif. “Yeah, I played good at the beginning; I came out playing well,” said Stephens, who turned 20 last week. “She raised her level and she played some pretty good tennis. In the end, she just played a little bit better.” After that first answer in her postmatch news conference, Stephens continued to unravel, this time in front of the microphone. She acknowledged that after battling back from 0-3 in the second set to get within a point of tying the score on her serve, she let it slip away. An ace got her to 40-15, but she could not close out the game and did not win another. “There’s no specific thing that I’d say has happened or is not happening, but I don’t think it really matters,” Stephens said of her recent struggles. “I’m 16 in the world. I can lose in the first round the next two months and I probably would still be top 30. I’m not really too concerned about winning or losing or any of that, I don’t think. My life has changed, yeah, but I wouldn’t say I’m in a panic or anything.” There was a stunned silence in the interview room, and when Stephens was asked to clarify that she indeed did want to win, Stephens rolled her eyes and shot back, “Obviously,” and then walked out. The normally smiling and charming Stephens has been under pressure since comparisons to Serena Williams gained steam and her results improved last year. She is now the highest-ranked American player behind Williams, who is No. 1. “She’s getting up there and she will definitely be able to mature her game,” said Williams, 31, who had her share of prickly moments with the news media at a young age. “Now that she’s a little more mature with her age, it all comes along. She’s been playing so well. Yeah, she’ll be fine.” | Tennis;Sloane Stephens;Serena Williams;Agnieszka Radwanska;Sony Open |
ny0025504 | [
"business",
"media"
] | 2013/08/06 | NBC Taps Seacrest to Host ‘The Million Second Quiz’ | Ryan Seacrest, who hosts “American Idol” on Fox and “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” every year on ABC, now has a prime-time gig on a third broadcast network. On Monday, NBC announced that Mr. Seacrest would be the host of “The Million Second Quiz,” an interactive game show that is taking over nearly two weeks of the network’s schedule in September. The announcement came after weeks of talks between NBC and Mr. Seacrest’s representatives, who had to ensure that the game show wouldn’t affect his many other commitments, like his daily radio show for Clear Channel. Mr. Seacrest is based in Los Angeles, but he will be in New York for the duration of the “Quiz,” which will pit trivia players against each other inside an hourglass-shaped structure in Midtown Manhattan. The first hourlong episode will be shown on Sept. 9, a Monday, and will run nightly through Saturday. Then, after a one-day pause for “Sunday Night Football,” the show will resume on Sept. 16 and run through Sept. 19, when the ultimate winner will be crowned. During the 23 hours between episodes, the competition will continue at the hourglass and through a mobile phone app promoted by NBC. Paul Telegdy, NBC’s president of alternative and late night programming, said in a statement that having Mr. Seacrest as host would help make the “Quiz” feel like the big-league television event that NBC wants it to be. “When people see Ryan Seacrest, whether at the Emmys, the Oscars or New Year’s Eve, he is at the epicenter of national events,” Mr. Telegdy said. “He is a broadcaster, in all the traditional sense, but also in the most contemporary — he is an accomplished host of live TV and a master of social media and pop culture. This makes him perfect for ‘The Million Second Quiz.' ” Still, the arrangement is unusual, since networks typically do not like to share talent; the fact that it came together is a testament to Mr. Seacrest’s broad appeal. He will be an executive producer of the “Quiz” as well as its host. On Twitter on Monday he called it an “insane concept”: “The game will take one million seconds to finish…12 days, unknown bathroom breaks.” The “Quiz” is initially a one-time scheduling stunt, but as with most things in television, if it proves to be popular, it could come back for another season. It is unclear whether Mr. Seacrest has committed to hosting future iterations, however. His main television job each winter and spring is at Fox, where he hosts “Idol” beginning in January. His “Idol” contract ends when the next season of the singing competition ends in May. Separately, Mr. Seacrest has a wide-ranging but nonexclusive contract with NBC’s parent company, NBCUniversal, that has him contribute to Olympics coverage, file reports for the “Today” show and produce reality shows for E! and other NBC-owned channels. That contract also ends next spring. | TV;NBCUniversal;NBC;Ryan Seacrest |
ny0181796 | [
"science",
"space"
] | 2007/12/04 | Hubble Space Telescope - NASA - Final Service Mission | GREENBELT, Md. — It’s the last roundup for the People’s Telescope. Next August, after 20 years of hype, disappointment, blunders, triumphs and peerless glittering vistas of space and time, and four years after NASA decided to leave the Hubble Space Telescope to die in orbit, setting off public and Congressional outrage, a group of astronauts will ride to the telescope aboard the space shuttle Atlantis with wrenches in hand. That, at least, is the plan. “It’s been a roller coaster ride from hell,” Preston Burch, the space telescope’s project manager, said in his office here at the Goddard Space Flight Center of the controversy and uncertainty. In a nearby building, the Hubble’s astronaut knights — dressed as if for surgery, in white gowns, hoods and masks —swarmed through a giant clean room to kick the tires, so to speak, of new instruments destined for the Hubble and to try out techniques and tools under the watchful eye of the Goddard engineers. They practiced sliding a new wide-field camera 3, suspended in air like a magician’s grand piano, in and out of its slot on a replica of the telescope that is mechanically and electrically exact down to the tape around the doors. “We have to train their minds and bodies,” said Michael Weiss, the deputy project manager of Hubble, adding that when the astronauts see the real telescope in orbit, “they say they’ve seen it before.” Spacewalking astronauts have refurbished the Hubble four times in the last two decades; but the trip planned for August, almost everybody agrees, really will be the last service call. The shuttles are scheduled to stop flying in 2010, and without periodic maintenance, the telescope’s gyroscopes and batteries are expected die within about five years. Astronauts, engineers and scientists here say they are resolved to pull off the most spectacular rejuvenation of the telescope yet, one, they say, that will leave it operating at the apex of its abilities well into the next decade so that it can go out in a blaze of glory. “It will be a brand new telescope, practically,” said Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute on the Johns Hopkins campus in Baltimore. He added, “We want to return crackerjack science we can be proud of.” The last visit, Dr. Mountain explained, is unique. “You don’t have to do routine maintenance,” he said. “It’s like a car you’re only going to keep another 20,000 miles. You don’t buy new tires.” Engineers and project managers are busy mapping out five days of spacewalks. If all goes well — never a given 350 miles above Earth — the astronauts will install a new camera and spectrograph and change out all the gyroscopes that keep it properly pointed and the batteries that keep it running. They are also planning to repair a broken spectrograph and the Hubble’s workhorse, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which had a severe short-circuit last winter and was pronounced at the time probably beyond repair. Dramatic turnabouts have characterized the history of the Hubble telescope, which was hailed before its launching in April 1990 as the greatest advance in astronomy since Galileo invented the telescope. In space, the Hubble would be able to discern details blurred by the turbulent murky atmosphere. But its 94-inch diameter mirror turned out to have been polished to the wrong shape, leaving it with what astronomers call a spherical aberration. The Hubble became branded as a “technoturkey.” In 1993, astronauts fitted the telescope with corrective lenses (at the cost of removing one of its five main instruments, a photometer), and the cosmos snapped into razorlike focus. Three more visits by astronauts kept the Hubble running and, by replacing old instruments, actually made it more powerful. Along the way, the astronauts graduated from yanking equipment fitted with large astronaut-friendly handles to operating on instruments never meant to be repaired by people wearing the equivalent of boxing gloves in space. In 2002, after an infrared camera named Nicmos unexpectedly ran out of coolant, the astronauts attached a mechanical refrigerator to run coolant through its pipes. A year later, the Hubble’s astronomers used the rejuvenated camera along with the advanced survey camera to record the deepest telescopic views ever obtained of the universe. The images captured galaxies as they existed a few hundred million years after the beginning of time. “When you have an instrument that reaches so far beyond what you’ve ever had before, you make discoveries that nobody ever thought of before,” said John Grunsfeld, who will be the payload commander on the Atlantis mission. “And we see things that nobody ever saw before. As a result, you know, Hubble became not just an observatory, but an icon for all of science. And Hubble has become part of our culture.” That status did not come cheaply. Edward Weiler, director of the Goddard center and formerly associate administrator for science at NASA, estimated that over the years the Hubble had cost $9 billion. “There are few people, especially Americans, who won’t say it was worth it,” he said. All this seemed doomed to a premature end after the shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003 that killed its crew of seven. Sean O’Keefe, who was then the NASA administrator, declared that a shuttle flight to the telescope was too risky because, unlike the space station, it offered no safe haven if anything went wrong with the shuttle. The public was appalled. Schoolchildren even offered to send their pennies to NASA to keep the telescope going. Some astronomers and engineers challenged the reasoning of Mr. O’Keefe, whose background was in public administration, and not engineering. Others in the space science community, noting that the science budget was being squeezed by President Bush’s Moon-Mars initiative, suggested that it was time to move on and that the Hubble repair money might be better spent on other science projects. “Everybody could see where he was coming from,” David Leckrone of Goddard, the Hubble’s project scientist, said, referring to Mr. O’Keefe’s distress about the Columbia and a mandate for increased emphasis on safety. But, he added, “It seemed so un-NASA-like. We would never have sent anybody to the Moon if we were so risk averse.” “I thought we were dead,” Dr. Leckrone said. “As long as he was administrator, it stuck.” In February 2005, however, Mr. O’Keefe resigned to become chancellor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. His successor, Michael Griffin, who has a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering, instituted a rigorous risk analysis, culminating in a two-day meeting of experts that concluded it was no riskier to fly to the telescope than to go to the space station. In fall 2006, after the shuttles had begun flying again, Dr. Griffin approved the Hubble mission to a standing ovation from scientists and engineers. “We all agree the risks are acceptable,” Dr. Leckrone said. “Griffin led us through that process with a good deal of intellectual vigor. He didn’t fake it.” As a backup, NASA will have the shuttle Endeavor, which is scheduled for a September mission to the space station, prepped for a quick launching if a rescue is needed. In the meantime, engineers, challenged by Mr. O’Keefe to keep the Hubble going as long as possible, learned to run it on a kind of austerity program, using two gyroscopes to keep the telescope pointed instead of the usual three (one for each dimension in space). They also learned how to preserve the batteries, which derive power from solar panels in the sunlit part of each orbit and provide electricity in the dark part. As a result, the batteries, which degraded rapidly for years, are now actually slightly stronger than before, the engineers say, and the Hubble has a healthy gyroscope in reserve in case one fails. “If it weren’t for two-gyro science,” Mr. Weiss, the deputy project manager, said, “the next gyro failure would take us out of science.” Besides Dr. Grunsfeld, who has been to Hubble twice, the crew includes Cmdr. Scott Altman, who led a Hubble mission in 2002; the pilot, Gregory Johnson; and the mission specialists, Andrew J. Feustel, Megan McArthur, Col. Mike T. Good and Michael J. Massimino, who also worked on the Hubble in 2002 and performed two spacewalks. The new wide-field camera was designed to extend the Hubble’s vision into the ultraviolet wavelengths characteristic of the hottest stars and into the longer infrared wavelengths characteristic of cool stars, complementing the abilities of the advanced survey camera. It will replace the wide-field planetary camera 2, which has been in the telescope since 1993 and has been its only visible-light camera for the last year. When the old camera is slid out, perhaps as early as the first spacewalk, will be “a heart-stopping moment,” Dr. Mountain said. Dr. Grunsfeld’s crew will install another new instrument, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, into the slot now occupied by an old corrective optics package known as Costar that is no longer needed. The instruments installed on the Hubble since the 1993 repair were built taking the mirror’s aberration into account. The new spectrograph is also designed to be sensitive to invisible ultraviolet light. Astronomers hope to use it to map a so-called “cosmic web,” stretching through intergalactic space, in which two-thirds of atoms in the universe are thought to be drifting and hiding. Those tasks will be the easier parts. One of the bigger challenges of the mission will be surgery on the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which can take pictures of things and break down their light to analyze their composition. The spectrograph had an electrical failure in 2004. To get inside the spectrograph, 111 screws that were never meant to be removed in space have to be unscrewed and kept from floating off. The plan is to clamp a plate over them beforehand and unscrew them through tiny holes. No such option exists for the Advanced Camera, the choice for 70 percent of Hubble’s prospective users and the chief dark-energy-hunting instrument on or off the planet. It suffered a huge short-circuit in its power supply last winter. In a task that could be spread over two spacewalks, the astronauts will clamp a new power supply to the outside of the camera. From there, according to ground tests, power can be fed back inside to the other parts of the camera through existing wires, unless they were damaged in the short-circuit. In one additional piece of business, the astronauts will attach a grapple fixture to the bottom of the telescope so that a robot spacecraft could grab it and attach a rocket module in the future. The rocket would then drop the telescope into the ocean. But that time is not yet. The telescope’s orbit will be stable through 2024, according to recent calculations. All of this work could, in principle, be performed in the allotted five days of spacewalks. In that case, when the Atlantis pulls away and human eyes glimpse the Hubble for the last time in person, the telescope would have its full complement of instruments to dissect the light from the cosmos for the first time since 1993. Running down a list of subjects like planets around other stars, dark energy and the structure of the universe, Dr. Leckrone called the telescope a toolkit for discovery. Noting that any astronomer in the world could propose to use it, he said: “A lot of brain power comes to Hubble. It’s mouthwatering to think of what they will do with it.” Asked whether the astronomers were tempted to run the rejuvenated instrument frugally to prolong its life beyond its anticipated 2013 demise, Dr. Mountain said the idea was to go for broke. “We don’t want to trade science for false longevity,” he said. | Hubble Space Telescope;National Aeronautics and Space Administration;Space;Engineering and Engineers;Space Stations;International Space Cooperation and Ventures;Space Shuttle |
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